119933179-Shestov-In-Job-s-Balances.pdf

In Job's Balances

<< | >>

Editor's Introductionby Bernard Martin

The extension of Lev Shestov¡‾s reputation as a brilliant and highly original philosopher beyond the confines of his native Russia is to be dated from the publication in France in the early 1920's of several of the essays later included in the volume entitled In Job's Balances.

By 1919 Shestov had lived sufficiently long under the Bolshevik regime to find it intolerable and to decide to exile himself. In 1920 he and his family settled in Paris where, some years later, he was appointed professor of Russian philosophy at the Institut des etudes Slaves and where he also lectured at various periods in the extension division of the Sorbonne. Though Shestov was still virtually unknown in the French literary and philosophical worlds at the time, in 1921 La Nouvelle Revue Fran§Ùaise accepted for publication, in its special issue commemorating the centenary of Dostoevsky's birth, his essay "La lutte contre les evidences." Its unique and trenchant treatment of the great Russian novelist aroused widespread admiration. Two years later the article was published, along with Shestov's essay on the last works of Tolstoy, "Le Jugement dernier," in book form in Paris under the title Les r§Ûv§Ûlations de la mort. A few months thereafter his study of Pascal "La nuit de Geths§Ûmani" appeared in Paris, and in the same year his book Potestas Clavium was published in Russian in Berlin.[1] By the time of Shestov's death a year before the outbreak of the second World War, practically all his works, originally written in Russian, had been translated into French and German, and some of them had also appeared in English, Danish, Dutch, and Spanish translations. The thought of the Russian-Jewish philosopher had become known to many, though genuinely appreciated by relatively few, throughout the European continent.

The essays devoted to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in In Job's Balances[2] do not represent Shestov's first treatment of the two gigantic figures of nineteenth century Russian literature. Since his youth he had been enormously fascinated by both writers, and while still in his thirties he had published two books relating their thought to that of Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he had recently discovered. In the first of these works - The Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching[3] (1900) - Shestov deplored the descent of Tolstoy from the "philosophical height" of War and Peace to what he regarded as the banality, as well as fanaticism and intolerance, of the moralistic tracts and homilies issued by the aristocratic proprietor of Yasnaia Poliana after the latter's decision to abandon the European clothing he had worn as a Russian count, to dress instead like a peasant, and to work in the fields of his estate for a few hours each day. Tolstoy, Shestov here argues, averted his gaze from the abyss that opened before him when he realized the enormity of the horrors of human existence and sought tranquility and an escape from skepticism and pessimism by turning to preaching. His preaching, which naively identified God with the "good" and "brotherly love," was motivated, however, not by authentic faith but by lack of such faith on Tolstoy's part, and gave him nothing more than the satisfaction of being able to hurl judgments and anathemas at "sinners" failing to fulfill the obligation of loving their neighbors.

Nietzsche, who experienced the terrors of life no less intensely than Tolstoy, was - Shestov here maintained - far more honest, both intellectually and morally, than the Russian novelist. Having sought "divine traces" and saving power in morality, i.e. in compassion and fraternal love, and not found them, the German thinker resolutely proceeded "beyond good and evil," proclaimed the "death of God," and set the principle of amor fati in the place of the morality and idealism t

hat had proved completely futile in his own desperate need. But even Nietzsche, with all his passionate honesty and spiritual audacity, could finally not stand firm in the face of the tragedy and misery of life; he, too, ultimately lapsed into the vulgarity of preaching. His paeans to the ¨¹bermensch, the superman, in his later work served the same purpose as Tolstoy's paeans to the "good." But the German philosopher, who suffered so deeply and thought so intensely, indicated the direction of the quest that can no longer be avoided. Shestov concludes his The Idea of the Good in Tolstoy and Nietzsche as follows: "The 'good,' 'fraternal love' - the experience of Nietzsche has taught us - is not God. 'Woe to all who love and have no elevation that is higher than their compassion. Nietzsche has shown us the way. We must seek that which is higher than compassion, higher than the 'good'; we must seek God."[4]

TOLSTOY

In the work published in 1900 Shestov branded the later Tolstoy as a pretentious and somewhat dishonest preacher. But in "The Last Judgment," the essay on the great novelist which is included in the present volume and which was written more than twenty years later, after he had an opportunity to read such posthumously published pieces as "The Diary of a Madman," "The Death of Ivan Ilich," and "Master and Man," Shestov presents a radically altered view of Tolstoy. The latter, he now contends, was always not primarily a preacher but a philosopher - indeed, one of the profoundest philosophers of modern times who concerned himself in his final period with what Plato defined as the highest theme of philosophy: death and dying. In all that Tolstoy wrote after Anna Karenina it is obvious, according to Shestov, "that everything which had formerly seemed to him to be real and to have a solid existence, now appeared illusory, whereas all that had seemed illusory and unreal now seemed to him the only reality." Tolstoy appears to have been forcibly expelled from the "common way that he previously pursued, throughout the period when he was writing his monumental novels, by an experience of unspeakable terror before the threat of impending death similar to that suffered by the protagonist of "The Diary of a Madman." In the last decades of Tolstoy's life, Shestov maintains, "All that he did had but one object, one significance: to loosen the bonds which bound him to this world common to all men, to throw overboard all ballast that gave his vessel equilibrium but at the same time prevented it from leaving the earth... He tramples underfoot everything that men hold most dear, he outrages all that they hold most sacred; shakes the foundations of society, and poisons the most innocent joys."

In "The Death of Ivan Ilich" and "Master and Man" Tolstoy undertakes, as Shestov puts it, "to spy on what is happening in a soul in its agony." In these two stories he shows us the utter solitude, the complete alienation from all ordinary values, conventions, and conceptions to which a man confronted with the immediate threat of extinction is brought. Such solitude and alienation, Shestov suggests, is the first step on the road to salvation. "The first condition, the beginning of the regeneration of the human soul, is solitude, a solitude which could not have been more complete in the bowels of the earth or in the depths of the sea, in which all legality, all reality, all the ideal substratum of everyday life will wither away."

The experience of the rich villager Vassili Andreivich Brekhunov, of "the corporation of merchants" in "Master and Man," proved prophetic, according to Shestov, of Count Tolstoy's own end. In the moments before his death in the snowstorm Brekhunov eagerly surrenders all his possessions and the great ideas that he had formerly nurtured, and he experiences a joy and liberating mystery. "I come, I come," Tolstoy has him cry out in ecstasy. "And he went," Shestov writes, "or rather he flew on the wings of his weakness, without knowing whither they would carry him; he rose into the eternal night, terrible and incomprehensible to mankind." It must have been a similar experience, Shestov suggests, that led the aged To

lstoy, on a dark night not many months after the whole civilized world had celebrated his eightieth birthday, to leave Yasnaia Poliana with his youngest daughter Alexandra for the restless and aimless wandering that ended with his death some weeks later at the stationmaster's house at Astopovo Junction. "His works, his glory, all these were a misery to him, a burden too heavy for him to bear. He seems, with trembling, impatient hand, to be tearing off the marks of the sage, the master, the honored teacher. That he might present himself before the Supreme Judge with unweighted soul, he had to forget and renounce all his magnificent past."

DOSTOEVSKY

In his other early work Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy,[5] published in 1903, Shestov stresses the immense change that became apparent in the mood and spirit of Dostoevsky's writing with the appearance in 1864 of Notes from the Underground (or The Voice from Underground). In his earlier period as a novelist, until he completed The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky had remained, according to our critic, the staunch champion of social justice and social progress, the devoted follower of Belinsky's idealism, the compassionate defender of the poor and oppressed, the high-principled man of reason, hope, and humanitarian sentiment. And this despite the fact that he had already undergone the experiences of waiting for the crash of bullets before a czarist firing squad, having his death sentence commuted at the very last moment, and then spending years at hard labor in Siberia. But suddenly, just as some of the fondest hopes of the reformers of the 1850's were coming to fruition, just as the serfs were emancipated by Alexander II and other progressive steps were taken by the government in Russia, to the joy of many of Dostoevsky's fellow-writers who rhapsodized about the dawn of a new, golden age, he himself appears to have concluded that all his previously cherished convictions and ideals were illusory and meaningless.

Notes from the Underground, Shestov observes, is "a heart-rending cry of terror that has escaped from a man suddenly convinced that all his life he had been lying and pretending when he assured himself and others that the loftiest purpose in life is to serve 'the humblest man.'"[6] Though he could not completely abandon a certain residual attachment to his youthful ideals - and this, according to Shestov, explains the agitated ambivalence of his later works, which alternate between affirmation of the traditional verities and total nihilism and despair - Dostoevsky had arrived at the realization, so agonizingly reflected by Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, that no intellectual or moral theory could ever "justify" the sufferings of one innocent child, and that no amelioration of the conditions of society could ever provide any consolation for these. He discovered, as Shestov puts it, that "absolutely no harmony, no ideas, no love or forgiveness, in brief, nothing that sages have devised from ancient to modern times can justify the nonsense and absurdity in the fate of an individual person." In the face of the horrors of real existence Dostoevsky, like Nietzsche, was forced - though he could never bring himself to do so completely - to repudiate idealism, to reject the consoling "truths" of science and philosophy. Universal norms, the harmony and regularity so eagerly sought by scientific inquiry and ethical theory, could not comfort men like Nietzsche and Dostoevsky; they could only crush and choke their spirits. Both the German philosopher and the Russian novelist were brought perforce, according to Shestov, to the "philosophy of tragedy," the philosophy whose last word is: "Not to transfer all the horrors of life into the realm of the Ding an sich, outside the bounds of synthetic a priori judgments, but to respect them!"

In the essay "The Conquest of the Self-Evident: Dostoevsky's Philosophy," written almost two decades later and included in the present volume, Shestov probes more deeply into the thought of the author of Notes from the Underground and The Brothers Karamazov. He now perceives Dostoevsky as one of those whom, according t

o an ancient legend, the Angel of Death sometimes visits and presents with one of the innumerable pairs of eyes with which his body is covered, so that the man henceforth sees new and strange things that he had not seen before and that those equipped with natural eyes only cannot see. Here Shestov writes: "He to whom the Angel of Death has given the mysterious gift does not and cannot any longer possess the certainty which accompanies our ordinary judgments and confers a beautiful solidity on the truths of our common consciousness. Henceforth he must live without certainty and without conviction... He sees that neither the works of reason nor any human works can save him. He has passed under review, with what carefulness, with what super-human effort, everything that man can accomplish by the use of his reason, all the glass palaces, and has seen that they were not palaces but chicken-houses and antheaps; for they were built on the principle of death, on 'twice two is four.' And the more he feels this, the more violently there wells up from the depth of his soul that more than rational, unknown, that primal chaos, which most of all horrifies our ordinary consciousness. That is why, in his 'theory of knowledge,' Dostoevsky renounces all certainty and opposes to it as his supreme goal - uncertainty. That is why he simply puts out his tongue at evidence, why he lauds caprice, unconditional, unforeseen, always irrational, and makes mock of all the human virtues."

The later Dostoevsky, Shestov urges in "The Conquest of the Self-Evident," can be truly understood only by readers prepared to undertake the most extreme efforts. "Those who wish to get close to Dostoevsky will have to make a whole series of special exercitia spiritualia; to live for hours, days, years, in the midst of mutually contradictory self-evidences. There is no other way. Only thus can one perceive that time has not one but two or even more dimensions, that laws have not existed for all time but are 'given' and only in order that the offense might abound, that it is faith and not works which can save souls, that the death of Socrates can shake the formidable 'twice two is four,' that God demands always and only the impossible, that the ugly duckling can change into the beautiful white swan, that everything has a beginning here but nothing ends, that caprice has a right to guarantees, that the fantastic is more real than the natural, that life is death and death is life, and other truths of the same sort which look out at us with strange and terrible eyes from every page of Dostoevsky's writing."

In his essay of 1921 Shestov further portrays Dostoevsky as the champion of the rights of the living individual against the claims of "common consciousness" or "omnitude," with its armory of "reason," "natural laws," "eternal truths," and "self-evidences." The living individual, Dostoevsky recognized, has perhaps been hypnotized by these weapons. It will be of no avail to fight against their spell with logic and intellectual arguments; all such arguments are finally rational arguments, which serve only to support the cause of reason and to confirm its pretensions. The sole instrument of any efficacy in the struggle is rebellion, ridicule, contempt. "There is only one weapon: mockery, invective, a categorical 'no' to all the demands of reason." Such, Shestov affirms, is the true critique of reason. What Immanuel Kant wrote in his Critique of Pure Reason was nothing but an apology for reason; the most shattering examination of the claims of reason that has ever been produced, and the sharpest challenge to its authority that has ever been issued, are to be found in Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and in the great novels derived from it. The basic purpose that inspires these works is, according to Shestov, struggle against self-evidence. "If you want to understand Dostoevsky," he writes, "you must always keep his fundamental thesis in mind: 'twice two is four' is a principle of death. We must choose; either we must admit this twice two is four, or we must admit that death is the end of life and the last judgment on it."

Dostoevsky's short story "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man," which appears in his Diary of a Writer, is interpreted by our critic in "The Conquest of the Self-Evident" as the novelist's retelling of, and commentary on, the biblical legend of the fall - a legend which Shestov himself regards as the profoundest symbol and a

llegory of the human condition and to which he returns repeatedly in his own writings. The protagonist of the story, the "ridiculous man" for whom all things have become indifferent, decides to die, lies down to sleep, and in his dream finds himself in a scene reminiscent of the first chapters of the Book of Genesis. He is surrounded by people who have not yet eaten of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, who possess no science, who know nothing of shame or anxiety, and who have neither the capacity nor the desire to judge anyone or anything. The ridiculous man is astonished by the incomparable beauty of these innocent children of the sun, and he understands that they know without the scientific information that is his, that the knowledge they command is of a kind totally incomprehensible to him. Though awed by the loveliness and innocence of these children of paradise, the earthly intruder proceeds to corrupt them all. He does this by conferring on them scientific knowledge, from which they then derive moral principles and rules. At once they come to experience shame, and their world is totally transformed. From free, innocent creatures they are changed into guilt-ridden automata hedged around by law, physical and moral. And such, Shestov contends, are all men in their fallen state today.

The central concern of Shestov's own agitated and impassioned striving in the last decades of his life was to restore to men the freedom he believed they had forfeited in their obsession with rational knowledge and the God who had primordially granted this freedom to them and who alone can give it back to them. This God was the living God of the Bible - not the God of the philosophers who is a principle or a postulate, an idea deduced by speculative thought from an examination of nature or the processes of history. And such, Shestov suggests in the closing lines of "The Conquest of the Self-Evident," was the God whom Dostoevsky was seeking through all his violent struggle against the logical and demonstrable "truths" of science and rationalist philosophy: "One cannot demonstrate God. One cannot seek Him in history. God is 'caprice' incarnate, who rejects all guarantees. He is outside history, like all that people hold to be to timi§ætaton. This is the meaning of all Dostoevsky's works; and this too the meaning of the enigmatical words of Euripides which we quoted at the head of this study: 'Who knows if life is not death, and death life?'"

SPINOZA

Among others in the series of "pilgrimages through souls" - that is how Shestov characterizes In Job's Balances - made by Shestov in his own struggle against the self-evident and in his quest for God, is one through the soul of the Jewish philosopher of seventeenth century Amsterdam, Baruch Spinoza. The results of this pilgrimage are to be found in "Children and Stepchildren of Time: Spinoza in History" and in the essay entitled "Science and Free Inquiry" which the author placed as a "foreword" to In Job's Balances.

Spinoza, Shestov asserts, was the man upon whom was laid the dreadful task of "murdering" God, i.e., the God of Biblical faith - and this by none other than God Himself. "He, who loved the Lord his God with all his heart and with all his soul - how often and how emphatically he speaks of this in his earlier works and in the Ethics - was condemned by God Himself to slay God... "Only of such a one will men believe that he has in reality and not in words accomplished this crime of all crimes, this deed of all deeds." How did Spinoza accomplish the deed? Reason, that reason which he so adored and to which he sang such fervent praises, led him to the conclusion that God is none other than the one Infinite Substance of the universe, or natura naturans. As such, He cannot be conceived as having any purposes, goals, desires, emotions. All His acts are necessary, dictated by the structure of His own being. Deus ex solis suae naturae legibus et a nemine coactus agit,[7] (God acts only in accordance with the laws of His own nature and is coerced by no one) and Res nullo alio modo a Deo produci potuerunt quam productae stint,[8] (Things could not have been produced by God in any other way than

they were produced). So Spinoza concluded. But this, Shestov points out, amounts, in fact, to saying that the living, omnipotent God of the Bible is a pious illusion, a myth, a being without existence or reality. "Spinoza's formula, 'Dens = natura = substantia', like all the conclusions drawn from it in his Ethics and his earlier works, simply means that there is no God. This discovery of Spinoza's became the starting-point for modern philosophical thought. However much one may talk of God, yet we know with certainty that we are not speaking of that God who once lived in Biblical days, who created Heaven and earth and man after His image, who both loves and also desires, is excited and repentant, strives with man and even sometimes gets the worst of it in that strife. Reason, the same reason which rules over triangles and perpendiculars and which, therefore, thinks that it owns the sovereign right to distinguish truth from lies; reason which seeks, not for the best, but the true philosophy - this reason declares with the self-sufficiency peculiar to itself, in a tone which admits no contradiction, that such a God can be no supremely perfect being, not even a perfect being at all, and can consequently be no God." Spinoza insisted, in a letter to one of his correspondents, that his philosophy accorded to God the same place of honor as do other systems. But this, Shestov declares, was a lie on the part of the "honest" philosopher of Amsterdam.

The driving passion behind Spinoza's intellectual endeavors was to create a metaphysical system more geometrico, a system that would be similar to mathematics in consisting of a set of universally valid propositions or necessary and eternal truths. He wished to abolish, once and for all, capriciousness and diversity of opinion in philosophy and make of it a strict science with a "permanent uniformity of judgments, bound up with the idea of necessity." And he was followed in his quest, according to Shestov, by Kant, who, contrary to the accepted view, did not strike out in a new and original philosophical direction but merely continued the work of his seventeenth century predecessor. Kant, Shestov asserts, "carried on Spinoza's programme to the end; he rescued piety and morality, but betrayed God by replacing Him by an idea, which he created after the image of the highest criterion of mathematical truths."

Kant was by no means alone, according to Shestov, in continuing Spinoza's labors. Fichte and Hegel were also his heirs, and the tendency of their philosophical endeavors was essentially similar. Indeed, all of modern philosophy, Shestov maintains, has attempted to follow Spinoza's professed rule (which he himself repeatedly violated): non ridere, non lugere, neque detestan, sed intelligere. "It sweeps away," Shestov complains, "beauty, good, ambition, tears, laughter, and curses, like dust, like useless refuse, never guessing that it is the most precious thing in life, and that out of this material and this alone, genuine, truly philosophic questions have to be moulded. Thus the prophets questioned, thus the greatest sages of antiquity, thus even the Middle Ages. Now only rare, lonely thinkers comprehend this. But they stand aside from the great highway, aside from history, aside from the general business of philosophy."

PASCAL

One of the "rare, lonely thinkers" who stood aside from the "great highway" of modern philosophy was Pascal, who declared, Je n'approuve que ceux qui cherchent en gemissant (I approve those only who seek with lamentation). It was inevitable that Shestov should also be drawn to make a pilgrimage through the soul of this restless figure of the seventeenth century, the intensity of whose spiritual quest parallels his own.

In "Gethsemane Night: Pascal's Philosophy" Shestov portrays the French thinker as one who "summoned Rome, reason, man, and the universe before the tribunal of Almighty God," and who did so because he sought, as the paper he carried about sewn into his cloak testifies, the "Dieu d'Abraham, Dieu d'Isaac, Dieu de Jacob -

non des philosophes et des savants." At first, through the period when he was writing his Lettres Provinciales with their defense of common sense and morality, Pascal, too, revered the authority of reason and feared its decrees and judgments; his last years, however, were one continual struggle against reason, which he now perceived as the chief instrument in men's striving to emancipate themselves from God. The statements, admonitions, and incantations that Shestov quotes from the fragmentary notes that constitute Pascal's Pens§Ûes show, despite the censorship of the book by Port Royal, how thoroughly disillusioned the great mathematician had become with the pretensions of reason, how categorically he rejected it in his religious searching, and how exultingly he rejoiced at its humiliation: "La raison a beau crier, elle ne peut mettre prix aux choses"; "Que j'aime §Ñ voir cette superbe raison humili§Ûe et suppliante!"; "Quand un homme serait persuad§Û que les proportions des nombres sont des v§Ûrit§Ûs immat§Ûrielles, §Ûternelles et d§Ûpendantes d'une prn qui elles subsistent et qu'on appelle Dieu, je ne le trouverai pas beaucoup avanc§Û pour son salut"; "Qu'on ne nous reproche pas le manque de clart§Û, car nous en faisons profession"; "Humiliez-vous, raison impuissante; taisez-vous, nature imbecile; apprenez que l'homme passe infiniment l'homme et entendez de votre ma§àtre votre condition veritable que vous ignorez."

Shestov traces Pascal's turning away from the "rational" and "self-evident," like Nietzsche's, to the constant physical pain and agonizingly unremitting spiritual anxiety with which both men were afflicted. One of Pascal's contemporaries reports that the philosopher always saw an abyss at his side and used to have a chair placed there to reassure himself. "It seems," Shestov writes, "that Pascal's illness and abyss were this strange shock, the saving gift without which he would never have discovered the truth. Pascal might have repeated with Nietzsche: It is to my illness that I owe my philosophy. His Pens§Ûes are only a description of the abyss. The great miracle of miracles is accomplished before our eyes. Pascal grows accustomed to the abyss and begins to love it. The solid earth gives way beneath his feet, it is frightful, terrifying! He is without support, a precipice opens at his feet which threatens to engulf him, and in horror at inescapable destruction he cries in agony: 'My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?' It seems that all is finished.

And indeed, something has ended, but something has also begun. New and incomprehensible forces manifest themselves, new revelations break through. Solid support fails, it is impossible to walk as of old, therefore one must fly. Obviously the old immaterial truths, which a thousand years of human thought have welded into a compact whole, will not only not help a man in this case, but will hinder him more than anything else. They, these veritates aeternae, continue to repeat inexorably that man of his very nature should walk and not fly, should incline towards earth and not towards heaven, and that there is and can be no good to be found where anguish and terror reign. And as the most terrible thing is violation of the 'law' and disobedience to the sovereign autocrat reason, qua nos laudabiles vel vituperabiles sumus, we must give up these audacious attempts, and submit ourselves humbly to the inevitable, make a virtue of this humility, and see this virtue as our 'supreme good.'" But Pascal refused to surrender his audacity, refused to resign himself to the inevitabilities defined by reason, refused to regard submission as the summum bonum.

Like the ancient Stoics and Spinoza, indeed, like all the rationalist philosophers who have apotheosized "universal intelligence" and its "eternal truths" and despised the refractory, arbitrary, and irrational individual "ego," Pascal, too, declared his hatred and contempt for this ego. "Le moi est haissable," he constantly reiterated. But this declaration is not to be taken seriously; certainly it is not to be understood in the same sense as that intended by the rationalist philosophers who sought general truths transcending, and indifferent to the fate of, individual persons. For, as Shestov notes, while Pascal "takes great pains to prove to us that the 'ego' is hateful... in reality he puts forth all his powers to defend it against the pretensions of the immaterial and eternal truths."

If Pascal had one central and supreme concern, it was nothing other than the salvation of the individual soul; and this, he was convinced, could come only from the living, omnipotent, mysterious, "wholly other" God of the Bible - not the lifeless and abstract idea to which the philosophers wished to reduce Him, and not from any other of their eternal truths. "The liberty forfeited by Adam and God's first blessing must be given back to the 'hateful ego and beside these great gifts of the Creator our earthly virtues and our 'eternal truths' are as naught."

Consistency, as Shestov notes, was of little concern to Pascal. On one page he could glorify reason, on the next revile it. Immediately after declaring that the "ego" is hateful and that man's supreme moral duty is to despise it, he could turn about and proclaim it the most precious thing in the world. What his deepest and truest sentiments were is not difficult to discern, but it is also clear that he could not completely liberate himself from the ideas of the rationalist philosophical schools through which he had gone. Pascal's was a restless and tortured existence, without peace, without sleep. But his life and his thought, Shestov suggests, must be the model for those few who have the will and endurance to struggle against the bewitched world of "eternal truths;" they too, in their martyrdom, must pay the price of foregoing rest and renouncing sleep.

PLOTINUS

In the work of the great neo-Platonist philosopher of the third century, Plotinus - at least in one aspect of it - Shestov discovers another one of the "rare, lonely" thinkers who at times departed from the broad, paved highroad of classical philosophy and entered upon dark and problematic byways in a personal struggle to overcome the self-evident. The key to Plotinus' philosophy, Shestov suggests, lies in the following statement from the third of his Enneads: "Insofar as the soul is in the body it rests in deep sleep." And that the philosopher, when faced with the necessity of choosing between "natural" (or "self-evident") and "revealed" truths, unhesitatingly chose the latter is attested, according to Shestov, by his striking words: "that which appears most real to common consciousness has the least existence."

It is true that Plotinus represents the culmination of the centuries-old Greek philosophical tradition and that he shared its high reverence for reason, logic, and clarity of thought. Nevertheless, he arrived at the conviction that the ultimate purpose of philosophy lies in a contemplation of the divine - or "the One," to use his own term - through a mystical, ecstatic experience in which critical self-awareness and all clear-cut, logical conceptions disappear. Despite his profound attachment to the Platonic tradition, Plotinus, according to Shestov, at times renounced the principle of contradiction and other supposedly unshakeable principles of logic and became what Plato would have called a misologist, a hater of reason, in his quest for to timi§ætaton, "what matters most." The supreme reality, he realized, could never be grasped in the formulae of logic and in the ready-made, self-evident categories of reason.

Plotinus was too much the product of the Greek philosophical schools that preceded him to fight openly against the "Logos," the canons of reason and self-evidence. But the fundamental inner tendency of his spiritual and intellectual striving is apparent when he refuses all positive definitions of "the One" to which he aspires as the Supreme Reality and Supreme Good, and when he admonishes himself and others to "soar aloft above knowledge." The method that he followed was never to reread anything that he had written, and to pay no attention to the inconsistency of what he now thought and wrote with what he had previously thought and written. Thus, at one moment he could approve the Gnostic teaching that true freedom and union with God are possible only through complete rejection of, and oblivion to, the sensuous world; at another, he could rage against the blasphemy of the Gnostics in scorning the Creator of the world and despising his physical gi

fts. At a deeper level, however, there is no real contradiction here, Shestov suggests. Plotinus never actually rejected the physical world. To escape from this world meant for the Greek philosopher, according to Shestov, "to disenchant the soul from the eternal truths of reason which command man to see in the 'natural' the bounds of the possible," and "his battle against the self-evident truths was no rejection of divine gifts but only the attempt to overcome the postulates by which reason transforms the life which God gave into scientific cognition."

Plotinus' ethics and theodicy, Shestov asserts, are of no great value or significance; in these, the philosopher merely follows the tradition of the Stoics. Nor are his rational attempts to reconcile Plato and Aristotle of any importance. What is of ultimate significance is Plotinus' conviction that one must struggle against the enchanting power that had persuaded men to accept "natural necessity" and to believe in the infallibility of reason with its offer of eternal and universally valid truths. Above all else, Plotinus, as Shestov understands him, sought God and the realm of God in which man may recover his lost freedom. "God demands nothing of man, He only gives. And in His realm, in that realm of which Plotinus sings in inspired moments, the word compulsion loses all meaning. There, behind the gate guarded by the angel with the flaming sword, even truth, which according to our conceptions has the most unquestioned of rights to demand submission, will cease to desire to compel any one, and will gladly welcome by its side a contradictory truth... And there will be the Creator of the real earthly miracles, the 'One' who brought sleep and trance to man and enchanted him by the self-evident truths of reason. To Him, the One who created our wonderful visible world, Plotinus' soul turns in his rare moments of inspired exultation. Then he sees that in a new balance hitherto unknown to man Job's sorrow really weighs more than the heavy sands of the sea; then his speech becomes ecstatic, and in the philosopher the psalmist is born - phyg§Ü monou pros monon: the flight of the one to the One."

SHESTOV's MESSAGE

Shestov sees in Plotinus a seeker after the God of biblical faith, even though the great neo-Platonist thinker was philosophically opposed to Christianity and to Judaism as religions. For Shestov himself, it is clear, this God is the supreme goal of his struggle. In the "pilgrimages" through the souls of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Spinoza, Pascal, and Plotinus, in the fifty-two pens§Ûes collected under the title "Revolt and Submission," and in the essay "Science and Free Inquiry," all of which were combined and published as In Job's Balances in 1929, Shestov continues the intense religious quest that is so clearly manifest in many of the essays and pens§Ûes published in his Potestas Clavium in 1923 and that was to be advanced still further in his last and greatest work Athens and Jerusalem, which appeared in French and German translations shortly before his death in 1938.[9]

Long before the publication of In Job's Balances Shestov had come to see a conflict between religious faith, on the one hand, and science and would-be scientific philosophy, on the other. Now he perceived the relationship as one of irreconcilable enmity. Furthermore, he insisted, philosophy misconceives its authentic task when it seeks only to ground and confirm the claims of scientific knowledge. True philosophy is an instrument in man's struggle to break out of the chains of necessity and regain God and freedom. It is philosophy in this sense that Shestov had in mind when he wrote one of the briefest but most striking pens§Ûes in "Revolt and Submission": "SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY. For a sick man we call the doctor, for a dying man the priest. The doctor endeavours to preserve man for mortal existence, the priest gives him the viaticum for eternal life. And as the doctor's business has nothing in common with the priest's, so there is nothing in common between philosophy and science. They do not help one another, they do not complement one another, as is usually assumed - they fight against one another. And the enmity is the more violent because it generally has to be hidden under the ma

sk of love and trust."

Shestov is not content simply with castigating science as the enemy of faith, the barrier which shuts man off from God and freedom. In In Job's Balances, as well as in his earlier and later works, he offers a trenchant critique of the intrinsic claims made by scientific inquiry to be the supreme method for discovering the truth. Science, he suggests, is fundamentally motivated by the desire to remove from its field of vision everything that is "miraculous" or "incomprehensible." Scientific man appears to recoil with dread before any phenomenon that is unanticipated or does not fall into his customary categories of explanation; and he defends himself against the threat by simply refusing to recognize the reality of such phenomena. Thus, Shestov concludes, "however much we may have attained in science, yet we must remember that science can give us no truth because, by its very nature, it will not and cannot seek for the truth. The truth lies there where science sees the 'nothing,' in that single, uncontrollable, incomprehensible thing which is always at war with explanation, the 'fortuitous.'" In its effort to exclude the possibility of anything radically new and previously non-existent lies, according to Shestov, the powerfully seductive attractiveness of the theory of evolution, "Spectral analysis has conquered space and brought heaven down to earth, the theory of evolution has conquered time by reducing the whole of the past and the future to the present. This is the supreme achievement of modern knowledge, which proudly boasts its perfection!"

Furthermore, Shestov argues, the scientific method of searching for the truth commits one to the assumption that what is in fact most significant for human beings is not real at all. Scientists sometimes presume to believe that they can discover the "purposes" of Nature, but at the same time they resolutely exclude pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, hopes, fears, passions, expectations. Yet it is surely in these emotions and aspirations that whatever purposes Nature may have must surely lie. The most unpromising way to discover Nature's purposes, Shestov suggests, is by studying the life of the amoeba and mollusc, or the fossilized remains of extinct animals, through scientific and experimental methods. Instead of learning anything truly significant from such study, we are more likely to lose our capacity for discovering anything at all about the final secrets and wonders of the universe. What we must rather do is "project our thought and feeling into the most intensive and complex seeking and struggling of the boldest and greatest representatives of humanity, of the saints, philosophers, artists, thinkers, prophets and 'conclude' and judge with them on the beginning and the end, on the first and the last things."

To attain the realm of God and freedom, man must overcome the timidity and fear that lie behind the enterprise of science and the philosophy that aspires to be scientific, and instead assert his audacity and irreducible individuality. "We must... throw ourselves greedily upon each 'sudden', 'spontaneous', 'creative fiat', each absence of purpose and motive and screen ourselves with the utmost care from the emasculator of thought, the theory of gradual development. The dominant of life is audacity, tolma; all life is a creative tolma, and therefore an eternal mystery, not reducible to something finished and intelligible. A philosophy which has let itself be seduced by the example of positive science, a philosophy which endeavors, and believes its essential task to be, to differentiate everything problematic and surprising into infinitely minute quantities, is not only bringing us no nearer the truth, it is leading us away from it."

Man has escaped from "the womb of the One," but he is still tempted to surrender the affirmation of his individual being by memories of the joyful, undisturbed peace of super-individual being. However, he must not succumb to the seductive promises of safety and comfort held forth by this womb. He must conquer his fear of the unlimited possibilities and difficulties that confront the single, independent being. That God wanted to teach man this lesson, Shestov suggests, may be the best explanation of the classical Christian doctrine of the Incarnation. "Cu

r Deus homo? Why, to what purpose, did He become man, expose himself to injurious mistreatment, ignominious and painful death on the cross? Was it not in order to show man, through His example, that no decision is too hard, that it is worth while bearing anything in order not to remain in the womb of the One? That any torture whatever to the living being is better than the 'bliss' of the rest-satiate 'ideal' being?"

How shall men find the way to the truth? Only, according to Shestov, by becoming like the author of the Twenty-Second Psalm who cried, "I am poured out like water and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels." It will not suffice, says Shestov, "for man to declare himself ready to live in filth and cold, to endure injury and sickness, to be burned in the brazen bull of the tyrant Phalaris." In addition what is required is that of which the Psalmist speaks: "to melt inwardly, to shatter the skeleton of one's own soul and to break that which is held to be the basis of our being, all that ready certainty and clear-cut definition of conception in which we are accustomed to see the vanitates aeternae." For one to be able to glimpse ultimate truth, everything in him must become broken and fluid. He must live through that utter desolation and lostness experienced by the author of the same Psalm when he cried, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" Only when one feels that there is no God, that man is utterly alone and abandoned to himself, is there hope that he will escape from the dream-world of empirical reality and begin to create for himself both causes and aims. Only when he has first gone through the experience of despair, believing that God is not and that man must himself become God and create all things out of nothing, can he hope to catch a glimpse of the true God and of ultimate reality.

In the period between the two great wars that engulfed Europe and the world in the first half of the twentieth century Shestov brooded endlessly over what he called, in a letter to his friend Serge Bulgakov, "the nightmare of godlessness and unbelief that has seized humanity." In Job's Balances is one of the most important testimonies to his relentless and passionate striving to destroy that nightmare and to restore, both for himself and others, faith in the God for whom all things are possible.

Bernard Martin

Case Western Reserve UniversityCleveland, Ohio

October, 1974

A NOTE ON "IN JOB'S BALANCES"

In Job's Balances was the eighth volume of the original Russian edition of Lev Shestov's works. Most of the essays found in In Job's Balances had been published previously in Russian journals:

# "Revelations of Death" in Sovremenye Zapiski, Paris, No. 1 (1920), No. 2 (1920), No. 8 (1921), No. 9 (1921), No. 10 (1922)# "Revolt and Submission" in Sovremenye Zapiski, Paris, No. 13 (1922) and No. 15 (1923)# "Children and Stepchildren of Time, Spinoza in History" in Sovremenye Zapiski, Paris, No. 25 (1925)# "Gethsemane Night" in Sovremenye Zapiski, Paris, No. 19 (1924)# "Vehement Words, Plotinus's Ecstasies" in Versti, Paris, No.1 (1926)

Note on changes: "A Note on the Author" by Richard Rees which appears in the J. M. Dent edition has not been reprinted. The essay "What is Truth," part of the R

ussian edition of In Job's Balances, has been removed from the English edition and included in the American edition of Potestas Clavium. The spelling of Chestov has been changed to Shestov.

[1] An English translation, by Bernard Martin, was published by the Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1968.[2] The original Russian version, Na Vesakh Iova, was published by Annales Contemporaines, Paris, 1929. An English translation, by Camilla Coventry and C. A. McCartney, was published by Dent and Sons, London, 1932. It is this version that is republished here in its entirety, with the exception of the essay "What Is Truth? On Ethics and Ontology," which is included in the English version of Potestas Clavium.[3] An English translation of the work, by Bernard Martin, is to be found in Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche, Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio, 1969, pp. 3-140.[4] Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche, p. 140.[5] An English translation of the work, by Spencer Roberts, is to be found in Lev Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Nietzsche, pp. 143-322.[6] Loc. cit., p. 169.[7] Spinoza, Ethics, Part I, Proposition XVII.[8] Ibid., Part I, Proposition XXXIII.[9] The original Russian text, Afiny I Jerusalim, was published by the YMCA Press in Paris only in 1951.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances

<< | >>

A letter from Lev Shestov to his daughters

Translated by Bernard Martin from the French version, Sur la balance de Job, published by Flammarion, Paris, 1971.It has seemed worthwhile to preface this volume with a letter written by Lev Shestov to his daughters shortly after the publication in Paris, in 1920, of his essay on Tolstoy, "The Last Judgment," in Nos. 1 and 2 of the Russian review "Annales contemporaines" ("Sovremennye Zapiski"). This essay was later included in the first part, entitled "Revelations of Death," of "In Job's Balances".

Geneva, April 13, 1921

"...And now on the subject of my article, it is a question here of the revelation of death. Tolstoy first wrote War and Peace, then "Master and Servant," "The Death of Ivan Ilich," and other short stories. This must not be forgotten. That is to say, it must not be thought that revelation proceeds solely from death. Death is the greatest mystery and the greatest enigma; not without reason has it inspired so many philosophers, artists, and saints. But no lesser are the mystery and enigma of life. And, basically, only he who has passed through life can understand or, more exactly, approach the mystery of death. If Tolstoy had not written War and Peace, he would not have written his last works either. Our reason is

directed by nature towards "action," and it is not at all necessary to despise action. Only he who has previously been able to act can give himself over to an active inactivity. Also, it would be a great mistake to deduce from "revelations of death" rules of life. The essential thing, precisely, consists in not deducing, that is to say, in being able to grasp life in its totality with all its irreconcilable contradictions. Ivan Ilich, at the hour of death, judges his previous life severely, but his judgment does not mean that this life had absolutely no value.

When the infant grows up, he is no longer attracted by his mother's breast, but it would not be natural if, from the first day, he rejected it. When we ascend a staircase we leave behind the lower step in passing to the higher, but previously the lower one was before us. This must not be forgotten; otherwise, one will obtain exactly the opposite of what he would have wished to obtain - this is to say, in place of a complete, living knowledge, a truncated, abstract knowledge. This is what sometimes happened to Tolstoy when, in his so-called "philosophical" works, he attempted to show life as proceeding from a single principle that he called "the good." That is not right. That is, men cannot unify in their human language all that they live through and feel in such a way that it can be expressed by a single word or single concept. It is a great art, a difficult art, to be able to keep oneself from the exclusivism toward which we are unconsciously drawn by our language and even by our thought, which is educated by language.

That is why we cannot limit ourselves to a single writer. We must always keep our eyes opened. There is death and its horrors. There is life and its beauties. Remember what we saw in Athens. Remember the Mediterranean, what you saw during our excursions in the mountains, or again at the Louvre. Beauty is also a source of revelation. And even the revelation of death is finally only the search, beyond the apparent horrors of decomposition and the end, of the principles of a new beauty. It is true that often the writer is so profoundly immersed in the disquietude of being that he does not manage, even in his best works, to exhaust all that there is to say or to see. But in Tolstoy, just as in Plato and Plotinus, the thought of death is accompanied by a particular sentiment, by a kind of consciousness that, even while horror rose before them, wings were growing in their backs. Probably something similar happens with the chrysalis when it begins to gnaw at its cocoon. It gnaws because it is growing wings. Thus neither the works of Tolstoy nor those of Plato or Plotinus should be interpreted as a call to forget life. To be sure, anyone finding himself in the state of Ivan Ilich judges many things differently from others. But he does not turn away from life. I would say, rather, that he learns to appreciate many things that were formerly matters of indifference to him.

Previously, cards and comfort seemed to him to be the sum of what one could attain; advancement in his work and the possession of an apartment similar to that of everyone else appeared to be the ideal of his situation in the "world." He perceived neither the sun nor the sky; he saw nothing in life, although it was all there before his eyes. And when death came, he understood suddenly that he had seen nothing, as if nothing existed in life beyond cards, advancement, and comfort. All that he had been able to see of truth, he had seen during his childhood, his youth; then he had forgotten it, employing all his powers only in not being himself but in being like "everyone." So the revelation of death is not a negation of life but, on the contrary, an affirmation - an affirmation, however, of something other than the habitual "rat-race" by which men allow themselves to be taken."

Here we find again the same preoccupations as those expressed through all the work of Shestov, and especially in the first books and articles published in French: "The Conquest of the Self-Evident," an essay commissioned by "La Nouvelle Revue Francaise" in 1921, on the occasion of the centenary of Dostoevsky's birth; "

Gethsemane Night" (a study of Pascal), "Revelations of Death" (a volume combining "The Conquest of the Self-Evident" and "The Last Judgment"), "Children and Stepchildren of Time" (Descartes and Spinoza), all of which figure in the present volume. On this first contact, the French public found itself directly confronted with the chief problems of the Shestovian philosophy, with the moments of supreme tension of being, where the latter transcends its proper limits, when it feels "wings growing in its back," and - even if it be only for a brief moment - perceives, beyond appearances, the "revelations" of life and of death.

Tatiana Rageot-Chestov

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances

<< | >>

Part I

REVELATIONS OF DEATH

ag§æn megistos kai eschatos ta§às psucha§às prokeitai.A supreme and final battle awaits the soul.

- PLOTINUS, Enneads I, vi, 7.

THE CONQUEST OF THE SELF-EVIDENTDostoevsky's Philosophy

tis d'o§àden, ei to dz§Ün men esti katthane§àn, to katthane§àv de dz§Ün;Who knows if life is not death, and death life?

- EURIPIDES.

1

"Who knows," says Euripides, "if life is not death, and death life?" Plato in one of his dialogues puts these words into the mouth of Socrates, the wisest of men, the very man who created the theory of general ideas and first considered the clarity and distinctness of our judgments to be an index of their truth. According to Plato, Socrates almost always when death is discussed says the same, or much the same as Euripides - no one knows whether life is not death and death life. Since the earliest days the wisest of men have lived in this state of mystified ignorance; only common men know quite distinctly what life is, and what death.

How has it happened, how could it happen, that the wisest are in doubt where the ordinary man can see no difficulty whatsoever, and why are the most painful and terrible difficulties always reserved for the wisest? For what can be more terrible than not to know whether one is alive or dead? "Justice" should insist that this knowledge or this ignorance should be the prerogative of every human being. What am I saying: Justice! Logic itself demands it, for it would be absurd that it should be granted to some to distinguish between life and death, while others were bereft of this power; for those who possessed it would then be comp

letely different from those to whom it is refused, and we should hardly have the right to comprehend them both under the category of human beings. He only is a man who knows certainly what life is and what death. He who does not know, he who even occasionally, were it but for a single instant, ceases to perceive the dividing line which separates life from death, ceases to be a man and becomes... what? Where is the Oedipus who can resolve this question and penetrate to the depths of this supreme mystery?

It is but right to add, however, that all men are by nature capable of distinguishing life from death, and make the distinction very easily, without any mistake. Ignorance only comes, to those for whom it is predestined, later; if I mistake not, it always comes abruptly, they know not how or why. And furthermore: this ignorance is always intermittent, it disappears and gives place to normal consciousness as suddenly as it has appeared. Euripides and Socrates and all those who are destined to bear the sacred burden of this supreme ignorance, generally know quite well what life is and what death, just like other men. But it happens to them sometimes to experience the feeling that their ordinary knowledge has deserted them, the knowledge which links them to the other beings so unlike themselves, and which kept them in touch with the whole world. That which all know, which all admit, which they themselves knew only a moment before, that which universal consent confirmed and justified, suddenly can no longer be called "their" knowledge. They have their own knowledge, alone, unjustified, and unjustifiable. Can we indeed hope ever to see Euripides' question generally admitted? Is it not obvious to us all that life is life and death is death, and that to confuse them with one another can only be madness or a mischievous wish to upset all self-evidence, and to bring disorder into the human mind?

How, then, did Euripides dare to pronounce these challenging words, and how did Plato dare repeat them? And why has history preserved them for us - history which destroys mercilessly everything which is useless or insignificant? One might perhaps say that it is mere chance; it can happen that a fishbone, a common sea-shell, will remain intact for thousands of years. Although these words have been preserved, they play no part in the spiritual development of humanity. History has fossilized them; they bear witness to the past, but are dead to the future; their fate is settled for evermore without appeal. This conclusion is self-evident. Are we in fact going to destroy the general laws of human thought, the fundamental principles of our own thought, for the sake of a few words from philosophers and poets?

Perhaps another "objection" will be raised. Perhaps it will be remembered that in a very wise old book it was said: "It were better for that man never to have been born who seeks to know what has been and what will be, that which is under the earth and above the heavens." But I should then reply that according to this same book, the Angel of Death who descends towards man to separate his soul from his body is all covered with eyes. Why is this? Why does he want all those eyes, when he can see the whole of heaven, and there is nothing on earth worth his seeing? I think that he did not want those eyes for himself. It happens sometimes that the Angel of Death, when he comes for a soul, sees that he has come too soon, that the man's term of life is not yet expired; so he does not take the soul away, does not even show himself to it, but leaves the man one of the innumerable pairs of eyes with which his body is covered. And then the man sees strange and new things, more than other men see and more than he himself sees with his natural eyes; and he also sees, not as men see but as the inhabitants of other worlds see: that things do not exist "necessarily", but "freely", that they are and at the same time are not, that they appear when they disappear and disappear when they appear. The testimony of the old, natural eyes, "everybody's" eyes, directly contradicts the testimony of the eyes left by the angel. But since all our other organs of sense, and even our reason, agree with our ordinary sight, and since the whole of human "experience", individual and collective, supports it, the new vision seems to be outside the law, ridiculous, fantastic, the produc

t of a disordered imagination. It seems only a step short of madness; not poetic madness, that inspiration with which even the handbooks of philosophy and aesthetics deal, and which under the names of Eros, Mania, and Ecstasy, has so often been described and justified where and when necessary, but the madness for which men are pent in cells. And then begins a struggle between two kinds of vision, a struggle of which the issue is as mysterious and uncertain as its origin.

Dostoevsky was undoubtedly one of those who possessed this double vision. But when did the Angel of Death visit him? The most natural thing would be to suppose that it happened at the foot of the scaffold when sentence of death was read out to him and his companions. However, it is probable that "natural" explanations are out of place here. We have got into the realm of the unnatural, of the eternally and essentially fantastic, and if we want to see anything, we must abandon all those methods and procedures which previously gave a certainty, a guarantee to our truths and our knowledge. It is possible that a yet more important sacrifice may be demanded of us. We may perhaps have to admit that certainty is not a predicate of truth, or, to express it better, that certainty has absolutely nothing in common with truth.

We shall come back to this later; but these words of Euripides can convince us that certainty and truth each exist independently. Suppose Euripides is right, and that indeed no one can be sure whether life is not death and death life; can this truth ever become certain? If all men daily repeated Euripides' words when they got up and when they went to bed, they would remain as strange and as problematical as on the day when the poet first heard them in the depths of his soul. Euripides made them his own because something in them fascinated him. He pronounced them knowing that no one would believe them, even though every one heard them. But he could not transform them into a certainty; he did not try, and I even think that he did not wish it. The whole charm, the whole attraction of these truths lies perhaps in the very fact that they deliver us from certainty; that they make us hope that what is called evident can be conquered.

So it was not while he was waiting for the execution of his sentence that Dostoevsky was visited by the Angel of Death. Neither was it while he was living in the Siberian camp, among men who intervened in the destinies of others and themselves became the sealed of destiny; The House of the Dead, one of his finest works, shows this.

The author of The House of the Dead is still full of hope. He suffers, he suffers horribly. He repeats more than once - and there is no exaggeration in it - that hell was little worse than these barracks, in which were penned several hundreds of strong, healthy men, for the most part above the average in ability, still young but perverted and filled with enmity and hatred. But he always remembers that outside the walls of this prison there is another existence. The strip of blue sky that he sees above the high walls is a promise of liberty to him. A day will come when all this will pass away, the prison, the branded faces, the vile oaths, the blows, the warders, the filth, the eternal clinking of the chains - all this will pass and a new, a noble existence will begin. "I am not here for ever", he tells himself again and again, "soon I shall be there - there where there is liberty, all that I dream of, all that the suffering soul desires. Here is a heavy sleep, a nightmare. There it will be waking, beautiful and happy. Open the doors of the prison, send away the warders, strike off the chains, it will be enough. I shall find the rest for myself, in this free and beautiful universe which I did not know how to appreciate before, although I saw it." What heartfelt and inspired pages Dostoevsky wrote on this subject!

"With what hopes my heart was then filled! I thought, I resolved, I vowed to myself that never again should there be evil in my life, nor any backsliding such as there had been before. I drew up a program for my future and resolved to follow it exactly. I believed blindly that I could accomplish it all, and that I

should do so. I eagerly awaited, I longed for my liberty. I wanted to try my strength again in fresh struggles. Sometimes a feverish impatience would seize me..." With eager desire he awaited the day that should bring him freedom, which should be the dawn of his new life. He was convinced that he only had to get out of prison, and that then he would prove to all, to others as well as himself, that our life on earth is a great gift from heaven. If one can avoid the old mistakes and pitfalls, one can already find, here on earth, all that man can desire, and quit this life, as the patriarchs did "in the fullness of their days". The House of the Dead fills a place apart among Dostoevsky's works; it is not in the least like anything he wrote either after it or before. It is so complete, so well proportioned, so full of quiet and majestic calm, and at the same time filled with such internal tension, and so strong, sincere an interest in everything that is taking place before the author's eyes. Unless we are much deceived, this book is an authentic record of the existence led by Dostoevsky during his four years' captivity. Nothing seems to be invention; he has not even changed the names of the prisoners. Dostoevsky was certain that what he saw at that time, no matter how horrible it might be, was reality, the only possible reality. Among the convicts there were brave men and cowards, truthful men and liars, cruel men and nonentities; there were some who were handsome and some who were ugly. There were warders and sentries, commandants, porters, doctors, and orderlies. Every kind of person, but all "genuine", "true", "definite" - and their existence is equally real and "definite." It was, indeed, a miserable, pitiable, uninteresting and wretched life. But it was not "the whole of life", just as the little strip of blue sky which could be seen above the prison walls was not "the whole" sky. Real life, rich and full of meaning, existed where men could see not only a little strip of sky overhead, but the whole great dome; where there were no more walls, but great stretches of space, boundless liberty, in Russia, in Moscow, in Petersburg, among men who were clever, good, active, and themselves free.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Conquest of the Self-Evident

<< | >>

2

Dostoevsky finished his time in detention and the military service which succeeded it. He went to Tver and then to Petersburg. Everything that he had expected came to pass. He had the vast dome of the sky over his head. He became a free man, like all the men whom he had envied while he was in chains. It remained for him now to fulfill the vows which he had made to himself when he was in prison. Dostoevsky did not, presumably, forget his resolutions, his ~ immediately; he must have made more than one desperate effort so to order his life that the old mistakes and the old follies should not be repeated. But it seems that the harder he tried the worse did he succeed.

He soon began to notice that the life of freedom came more and more to resemble the life in the convict settlement, and that "the vast dome of the sky" which had seemed to him limitless when he was in prison now began to crush and to press on him as much as the barrack vaults had used to do; that the ideals which had sustained his fainting soul when he lived amongst the lowest dregs of humanity and shared their fate had not made a better man of him, nor liberated him, but on the contrary weighed him down and humiliated him as grievously as the chains of his prison. The sky oppressed him, the ideals fettered him, and the whole human existence became like that of the inhabitants of the "House of the Dead", a

heavy and painful slumber filled with hideous dreams.

How had this happened? Yesterday Dostoevsky had written The House of the Dead in which the existence of the convicts, those involuntary martyrs, was described as a nightmare, from which nevertheless deliverance was promised, after a certain appointed date, the approach of which could be measured quite certainly on the stockade surrounding the barrack yard. The chains had only to be taken off, the doors of the prison to be opened, for the man to be free and his life to begin again in all its fullness. So, as we have seen, Dostoevsky thought; his eyes showed him that it was so, and so did his other senses and "divine" reason. Then suddenly a new witness appeared, against all the others. Dostoevsky of course knew nothing about the gifts of the Angel of Death. He had heard of this angel, but it could not have entered his head that this mysterious, invisible guest should share his gift with a mortal. Yet it was impossible for him to reject the gift, just as we cannot reject the gifts of the Angel of Life. All that we possess we receive we know not whence nor from whom. It has all been apportioned to us, before we were able either to ask questions or to answer them. This second sight was apportioned to Dostoevsky unasked, as unexpectedly and as arbitrarily as the first. There is only one difference, which I have mentioned but which, in view of its importance, I wish to stress: while the first sight begins in man at the same time as all the other faculties, with which it is therefore in complete harmony, the second sight only awakens much later, and the giver of this gift troubles not at all to make it harmonize or agree. Death is the greatest dissonance, the most brutal rupture (and a premeditated one) of every chord. If we were really persuaded that the law of contradiction is the fundamental principle, as Aristotle teaches, then we should be obliged to declare: in the world there is either life, or else death; the two cannot co-exist.

But the law of contradiction is not so unshakable and all embracing as we have been told, or else man does not always dare apply it and only does so within the limits of the world in which he himself can play the part of creator. Where man is master, where he rules, this principle serves him very well. Two is greater than one, not equal to one, nor less. But life was not created by man, nor did he create death. And although mutually exclusive, they co-exist in the world, to the despair of human thought, which is obliged to own that it does not know where life begins and where death; nor whether that which appears to be life is not death and that which appears to be death, life.

Dostoevsky suddenly "saw" that the sky and the prison walls, ideals and chains are not contradictory to one another, as he had wished and thought formerly, when he still wished and thought like normal men. They are not contradictory, but identical. There is no sky, no sky anywhere, there is only a low and limited horizon. There are no ideals exalting the soul, but only chains, invisible indeed, but binding man more securely than iron. And no act of heroism, no "good work" can open the doors of man's "perpetual confinement". Dostoevsky's barrack vows of "improvement" now appeared to him as a sacrilege. The experience which he underwent was much the same as Luther's when he remembered with such unfeigned horror and disgust the vows which he had pronounced on entering the convent: ECCE DEUS, TIEI VOVEO IMPIETATEM ET BLASPHEMIAM PER TOTAM MEAM VITAM.

This new "sight" is the subject of The Notes from Underground, one of the most extraordinary works, not only of Russian, but any literature. Most people only saw, and only see today in this little book a "scandalous revelation". Somewhere down there, in the underworld, are wretched, sick, unhappy beings, the step-children of fate, abnormal creatures who in their senseless bitterness reach the uttermost limits of negation. As though these beings were only the product of our own times, and had not existed before! Dostoevsky, it is true, was himself partly responsible for this interpretation and suggests it in the note which he has written at the head of the work. And he may have done this in honesty and sincerity. Truths of that kind which appeared to the eyes of the underground man are

of their very origin such that though they may be stated, they need not, and indeed cannot, be made into good, useful truths suitable at all times and for all people. Even their discoverer cannot make them quite his own. Dostoevsky himself was uncertain, to the end of his life, whether he had really seen what he described in The Notes from Underground, or whether he had dreamed it, taking hallucinations and ghosts for reality. Hence the strange style of the underground man's story; this is why each of his sentences gives the lie to the one before and mocks it; this explains too its bursts of ecstasy, of inexplicable joy, alternating with fits of no less inexplicable despair. It is as though he has stumbled over a precipice and fallen sheer into an unplumbed abyss. An unexampled, joyous feeling of flight, combined with terror of the abyss, the all-engulfing void.

From the first pages of the story, we feel a terrible, supernatural power catch up the writer and carry him off. This time our judgment is not at fault - remember the Angel of Death. The writer is in ecstasy, he is beside himself, he runs he knows not whither, he awaits he knows not what. Read the last lines of the first chapter:

"Yes, the man of the nineteenth century must be, is morally obliged to be, a characterless individual; the man of action must be a commonplace person. Such is the conviction of my forty years. I am forty, and forty years are a whole lifetime. It is disgusting, low and immoral to live more than forty years! Who lives more than forty years? Answer me honestly and sincerely. I will tell you: imbeciles and good-for-nothings. I will tell you so in the face of all the old men, all the old men with their silver, perfumed hair. I will tell you so in the face of the whole world. I have the right to say it because I, myself, shall live to sixty, to seventy, to eighty years. Wait, let me take breath!"

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Conquest of the Self-Evident

<< | >>

3

Indeed, from the very beginning, we have to stop and take breath. And these words, "let me take breath", might serve as the conclusion to every one of the succeeding chapters. Dostoevsky himself, and his readers, have their breath taken away by the tempestuous rush of wild, "new" thoughts which well up from the secret depths of his being. He does not understand what he is feeling, nor why these thoughts come to him. Are they even thoughts, or simply diabolical whisperings? Do they portend good or evil? There is no one to ask, no one can answer these questions. Neither Dostoevsky himself nor any one else can be certain that these questions can be asked, or that they have any meaning whatsoever. But it is not possible to put them on one side, and sometimes it does not even seem necessary to do so. For instance, re-read this sentence: "The man of the nineteenth century must be a characterless individual; the man of action must be a commonplace person." Is this a serious conviction, or a collection of words without meaning? At first sight there can be no question about it - nothing but words! But let me remind you that Plotinus, "universally recognized" as one of the greatest thinkers of antiquity (of whom I think Dostoevsky never even heard), expresses exactly the same thought, although in another form. He also opines that the man of action is always mediocre, that the essence of action is limitation. The man who cannot, or will not, give himself to thought or contemplation is the man who acts. But Plotinus, who is quite as "distraught" as Dostoevsky, says this very

quietly, almost as though it were a thing that goes without saying, that every one knows and every one admits. Perhaps he is right: when one wants to contradict the verdict of every one else the best thing is not to raise one s voice. The problematic, even the inconceivable, is often quite easily admitted to be self-evident if so presented. Later on Dostoevsky himself sometimes made use of this method, but at the moment he was too violently moved by the new "revelations" which assailed him, and was not master of himself. Moreover, Dostoevsky was not sustained by the philosophical tradition on which Plotinus could lean, for Plotinus was the last of a long line of great Greek thinkers; he had behind him nearly a thousand years of intensive philosophic activity: the Stoics, the Academicians, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Parmenides and all the masters of word and thought whose authority was universally acknowledged.

Plato, too, knew the "underground", but he called it a "cave" and created his splendid and world-famous myth in which men were likened to prisoners in a cave. But he did it in such a way that no one thought of calling Plato's cave "underground" nor calling Plato himself a sickly, abnormal being, one of those for whom normal men have to invent theories, treatments, etc. The same thing happened to Dostoevsky "underground" as to Plato in his cave; his new eyes were opened and found only shades and phantoms where "every one saw reality; and in that which was nonexistent for "the world" he saw the only true reality.

I do not know which of the two better attained his object: Plato, who was the creator of idealism and submitted all humanity to his influence, or Dostoevsky, who expressed his visions in such a form that every one turned from the underground man with horror.

I said "attained his object", but I think I expressed myself badly. It is probable that neither Plato nor Dostoevsky consciously pursued any definite aim when they spoke, the one of his cave and the other of underground, just as one cannot attribute a conscious aim to a being passing for the first time from nothingness into existence. Aims are only horn later, much later; "in the beginning" there is no aim. Man is oppressed by a torturing sense of nothingness, a sense which has not even got a name in our language; the so-called "inexpressible", which is not, however, really inexpressible, but simply as yet unrealized, in process of formation. We can give a certain idea, or at least an indication of this feeling by saying that there is in it a very definite sensation that the state of equilibrium, of perfect achievement, of complete satisfaction considered by common consciousness as the ideal of human thought, is absolutely insupportable (for "common consciousness" read Dostoevsky's "omnitude" or Plato's "many").

Antisthenes, who called himself a pupil of Socrates, declared that he would rather lose his reason than feel pleasure. Diogenes too, whom his contemporaries looked upon as a Socrates gone mad, feared equilibrium and achievement more than anything in the world. It seems that the life of Diogenes reveals the true nature of Socrates in some ways more plainly than Plato's brilliant dialogues. At least, any one who wants to understand Socrates should study the ugly face of Diogenes as well as the more engaging classical features of Plato. Perhaps Socrates gone mad is that Socrates who will speak most honestly about himself. For the matter of that, no sane man, whether foolish or intelligent, will really speak to us about himself, but only about things that can be useful or helpful to every one. His sanity lies in the very fact that he makes statements which are useful to all, and does not even see anything that is not good for all people and for every occasion. One might say that the "sane" man is "man as such". And it is perhaps one of the most curious paradoxes of history, and one which should attract the attention of the philosophers, that Socrates, who was less of a "man as such" than any one else, demanded that people should consider him as the archetype of man as such and nothing else. This thought of Socrates was afterwards taken up and developed by Plato; only the Cynics, those precursors of the Christian saints, tried to expose Socrates' secret to the world. But the Cynics have passed a

way without leaving any traces in history.

The strange thing about history is that with an admirable, almost human and conscious art, it effaces all signs of anything strange and extraordinary which happens in the world. That is to say, historians, those who interest themselves most in humanity's past, are convinced that everything accomplishes itself in the world "naturally" and "with sufficient reason

The first object of history, as always understood, is to reconstruct the past as an unbroken series of happenings linked together by causality. To historians, Socrates is and can only be a "man as such". Whatever was peculiarly"Socratic" about him "had no future" and consequently did not exist in the eyes of the historian. The historian only attributes significance to things that merge with the stream of time and contribute to it. The rest does not concern him. He is even convinced that the rest disappears without leaving any trace. This residue, which makes Socrates what he is, is in fact neither matter nor energy, which is preserved by the uncreated and therefore eternal laws. The real Socrates is, in the eyes of the historian, that which cannot be preserved. He comes, he goes. He was, he is no longer. That sort of thing cannot figure in the accounts either of earth or of heaven. All that counts is Socrates "the man of action", he who has left traces of his passage on the stream of social life. Even today we find a use for Socratic "thought". We read of certain actions which can serve as examples to us: his courage, his calm in the face of death. But Socrates himself - who needs him? It is just because he is not necessary to any one that he has disappeared and left no trace. If he had been necessary there would have been a "law" to conserve him. Is there not a "law" for the conservation of matter, a law which ordains that not a single atom can go back into non-existence?

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Conquest of the Self-Evident

<< | >>

4

Dostoevsky, too, saw life with natural eyes, the eyes of the historian. But when he received the second pair of eyes, he saw other things. The underworld is not at all the miserable place in which Dostoevsky had made his hero live, nor is it the solitude which, to quote Tolstoy, could not have been more complete in the bowels of the earth or in the depths of the sea. On the contrary, we must repeat that Dostoevsky sought solitude in order to save himself, or try to save himself, from this underground place (Plato's "cave") where "every one" has to live, which every one regards as the only real world, the only possible world, that is to say, the one world justified by reason.

We can see this too among the monks of the Middle Ages. They, too, had the utmost dread of that spiritual balance which reason regards with assurance as the supreme end of earthly existence. Asceticism was not, as is generally supposed, designed to fight the flesh. The primary aim of the monks and hermits who exhausted themselves with fastings, watchings and similar "works" was to emancipate themselves from that "omnitude" of which Dostoevsky's underground man speaks, that common consciousness which the scholarly and philosophical vocabulary has designated as "consciousness in general". Ignatius Loyola formulates the fundamental rule of the "Exercitia spiritualia" as follows: "Quanta se magis repent anima segregatam et solitariam, tanto aptiorem se ipsam reddit ad quaerendum intellige

ndumque Creatorem et Dominum suum" (the more secluded and solitary the soul feels itself, the better does it fit itself to seek and understand its Lord and Creator).

Common consciousness, omnitude, Dostoevsky's principal enemy, is that outside which man cannot conceive of existence. Aristotle had already said: "The man who needs no one else is either a god, having all things within himself, or else a wild beast."

Dostoevsky, like the saints engaged in saving their souls, hears a mysterious voice ceaselessly whispering to him: "Be bold. Go forth into the desert, seek solitude! There you will become either a god or a wild beast. Nothing can be certain beforehand: first give up common consciousness and then we shall see." Incidentally, the real case is clearly far worse - if you give up this consciousness, you will first of all be transformed into a beast and only later - nobody knows when - will the last, hypothetical metamorphosis take place, the possibility of whose existence was only admitted by Aristotle to complete his theoretical formula. Is it not evident, in fact, that man can transform himself into a wild beast, but that it is not given to him to become a god?

Human experience, the experience of the thousands of years of our existence, is there to confirm the predictions of reason: men constantly transform themselves into beasts, into brutal, stupid, and savage animals, but there have not yet been gods among them. The experience of the underground man has been the same. Read his own confessions. He tells us incredible things about himself on every page, things that even an animal would be ashamed to admit. "Do you know what I really want? That you should all go to the Devil, that is what I want. I want peace. But do you know that in order not to be disturbed, I would willingly sell the whole world for a kopek? Should the whole world perish, or should I have to do without my cup of tea? I should say: let the whole world perish so long as I can have my tea. Did you know this, yes or no? Well, I know quite well that I am a good-for-nothing, an idler, an egoist." And on the next page: "I am the most ignoble, the most ridiculous, the most cowardly, the most envious, the stupidest worm that crawls on the face of the earth."

The whole book is filled with similar confessions. And if it pleases you, you can add the superlative of every bad word that comes into your head: the underground man will repudiate none, he will accept them all, and even thank you for them. But do not triumph on that score; read the books and the confessions of the great saints; they all regarded themselves as the most horrible sinners (always superlatives, again), the most vile, the weakest, the stupidest of creation. St. Bernard, St. Theresa, St. John of the Cross, all the saints were filled with horror at their nothingness and sinfulness until they had drawn their last breaths. All the significance of Christianity, and of the thirst for redemption which was the motive power in the spiritual life of the Middle Ages, springs from this feeling. "Cur Deus homo?" Why was it necessary for God to become man and to accept the unheard of tortures and the insults recorded in the Scriptures? Because without this, it would have been impossible to save man, and to redeem his horror and his vileness. His ugliness is so monstrous, his fall so deep, that no earthly treasure could redeem his sin; neither silver nor gold, nor hecatombs, nor even the best of good works. God had to send His only son, to make the supreme sacrifice. Without this it was impossible to save the sinner.

Such was the belief of the saints, such their philosophy, and such their very words. And this was what Dostoevsky saw when the Angel of Death forsook him, after having left with him, all unobserved, one of the innumerable pairs of eyes. From this standpoint The Notes from Underground might serve as an excellent commentary on the works of the great saints. I do not mean to say that Dostoevsky was simply repeating in his own fashion what he had learnt from other men's books. He would have written The Notes from Underground even if he had known nothing

about the lives of the saints. And we have every reason to believe that when he wrote the book, he did not know much about their writings. This fact gives a peculiar significance to his confessions. Dostoevsky did not feel himself supported by any authority or tradition. He acted on his own responsibility, and it seemed to him that he alone, since the world began, had seen these extraordinary things revealed to him. "I am alone, and they are all together", he cries, overwhelmed. Torn away from common consciousness, rejected by the only real world, whose reality is founded on this very common consciousness - for what other basis could the world ever choose ? - Dostoevsky seems suspended between heaven and earth. The earth has given way under his feet, and he hardly seems to know whether it is death, or a second, miraculous birth. Can man exist without resting on some solid basis? Or will he be himself annihilated if his feet no longer touch the earth?

The ancients said that what distinguished gods from mortals was the fact that their feet never touched the earth, for they had no need for support. But these were gods, and ancient gods at that, mythological beings, pure invention, and rightly scorned by modern, scientific thought. Dostoevsky knows all this as well as any one else, or better. He knows that the ancient gods, like the new God, have long since been banished by reason beyond the bounds of possible experience, and transformed into pure ideas. Russian literature of the time proclaimed it with all the earnestness permitted by the contemporary censorship. The philosophy of Western Europe, including Kant and Comte, was also at Dostoevsky's disposal, although he did not read either Kant or Comte. There was no need to read them. "The limits of possible experience," that formula of the nineteenth century, which our time has received as the supreme revelation of scientific thought, reared itself like the great wall of China, against all the efforts of human curiosity. No one questions that there exists a certain human experience, collective or even ecumenical, and that there is no possibility of comprehending anything that lies beyond its borders, which are rigidly defined by reason. But this experience and its limits, as they appeared to Kant and Comte, were to Dostoevsky another prison wall built by an unknown hand. The walls of the old barracks were a thing of terror, but above those walls there was always a little strip of blue sky. Nothing of any sort can be discerned beyond the walls of experience. They are the end, the full stop. The road is closed and on the wall we may read the Dantesque inscription, "Lasciate ogni speranza".

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Conquest of the Self-Evident

<< | >>

5

In his House of the Dead, Dostoevsky speaks much of the men condemned to perpetual imprisonment there, and of their desperate efforts to escape. The man knows quite well what risks he runs, how much he stakes on a single card, and how slender is his chance, yet he decides to take the chance. When he was in the settlement Dostoevsky was already especially attracted by these resolute men whom no obstacle could turn from their purpose. He tried by every means in his power to understand their psychology, but he did not succeed. This was not from want of penetration or of power of observation on his part, but because such an understanding was not possible. Nothing can "explain" decision. Dostoevsky could only say that resolute men are rare everywhere, among the convicts just as elsewhere. It would be more accurate to say that there are no resolute men at all, only gre

at "resolutions", which it is impossible to understand, because they are not usually founded on any basis, and exclude all motives. They are subject to no rule; they are "resolutions" and "great" just because they are outside all rules, and consequently beyond any possible explanation. In the convict settlement Dostoevsky had not yet realized this; he thought, like every one else, that human experience has its limits, which are determined by unshakable and eternal principles. But a new truth revealed itself to him in his "underground": these eternal principles do not exist, and the law of sufficient reason, on which they are based, is only an auto-suggestion of man adoring his own limitations and prostrating himself before them -

"Simple men and men of action prostrate themselves quite sincerely before the wall. For them this wall is not, as it is for us, an excuse, a pretext to turn aside from the path, a pretext in which we ourselves do not generally believe, but of which we gladly take advantage. No, they prostrate themselves in all good faith. The wall has some soothing quality for them, something moral and definite, even, perhaps, something mystic... Well, it is just this simple individual whom I look upon as the normal man, such as tender Mother Nature would have him, when she amiably allowed us to be born into this world. I envy this man. He is stupid, there is no disputing that, but perhaps - who knows ? - the normal man ought to be stupid. Perhaps it is even very beautiful so."

Think over these words; they are worth it. They are not an irritating paradox, but rather an admirable philosophical revelation accorded to Dostoevsky. Like all the new thoughts of the "underground" man, this takes the form of a question, not of an answer. And then there is that inevitable "perhaps" which again seems put there on purpose to transform budding answers into new, unanswerable questions. Perhaps normal man ought to be stupid, perhaps this is even beautiful. Always this "perhaps," which weakens and discredits the thought; this doubtful, fitful half-light, intolerable to common sense, obscuring the outlines of things, rubbing out the limits to such a degree that one can hardly tell where one begins and the other ends. One loses all self-assurance; all movement towards a settled objective becomes impossible. But the great thing is that this ignorance suddenly appears to us to be, not a curse, but a gift from heaven -

"Ah, tell me, who was it who first said, first proclaimed that if man were enlightened, if his eyes were opened to his true, normal interests he would immediately become good and honest; that having been enlightened by science and understanding to his true interests, he would see that the good was his own advantage? For it is notorious that no one knowingly acts against his interest; and consequently, he would be necessarily obliged to do right. 0 child! 0 pure and simple child!... Interest! What is interest? But suppose there are cases, in which, sometimes, human interest not only can, but must consist in desiring harm for oneself and not advantage! If this is the case, if such a case were even possible, the whole rule falls to the ground."

What attracts Dostoevsky? The "perhaps", the unexpected, the suddenness, the darkness, the caprice, all those things which from the point of view of science and common sense either do not or should not exist. Dostoevsky knows perfectly well what is the general opinion. He knows too, although not familiar with the doctrines of the philosophers, that a disrespect for rules has always from the earliest times been regarded as the greatest of crimes. But here a horrible suspicion enters his mind; suppose man has always been mistaken on this very point?

It is really astonishing that Dostoevsky, who had absolutely no scientific or philosophical training, should have been able to understand so exactly where the fundamental and eternal problem of philosophy lay. No manual of philosophy has made a study of The Notes from Underground, or even quoted its title. There are no foreign expressions in it, no scholarly terminology; the academic seal is lacking, therefore it cannot be philosophy.

Yet, if ever a "Critique of Pure Reason" was written, it is to Dostoevsky that we must go to seek it, to The Notes from Underground, and the great novels which were wholly derived from it. What Kant gave us under this title is not a critique but an apology of pure reason. Kant did not dare to criticize reason, although he believed himself to have awakened under Hume's influence from dogmatic slumber. How did Kant put his question? Mathematics exists, the natural sciences exist: is a science of metaphysics possible, with a logical structure like that of the already sufficiently established positive sciences? That is what Kant called "criticizing", "waking from dogmatic slumber". But if he had really wished to awake and criticize, he would first of all have asked the question, whether the positive sciences had really established themselves, whether they had the right to call their achievements "knowledge". Are not all that they have to teach us lies and illusion? Kant had so little awakened from his dogmatic slumber that he never thought of asking this question. He is convinced that the positive sciences are justified by their success, by the services, that is, that they have rendered to mankind. Therefore, they cannot be judged; it is for them to judge. If metaphysics wants to exist, it must first ask the sanction and the blessing of mathematics and the natural sciences.

One knows the rest; the sciences which "success" has justified have only acquired their scientific character thanks to the series of rules, principles and synthetic a priori judgments which they have at their disposal; general, necessary, immutable rules from which, in Kant's opinion, no awakening can deliver us. Moreover, since these rules are only applicable within the "limits of possible experience", metaphysics, which (according to Kant) aims at the transcendent, is an impossibility. Thus did Kant reason, who in his verdict embodied the whole practice of human scientific thought. Dostoevsky, although he knew nothing of Kant, asked the same question, but his vision was much deeper. Kant saw reality with the eyes of every one; Dostoevsky, as we know, had eyes of his own.

With Dostoevsky the positive sciences do not judge metaphysics; on the contrary it is metaphysics which judge these positive sciences. Kant asks: Is metaphysics possible? If so, let us continue the experiments of our predecessors. If not, let us give up, and respect our limitations. Impossibility is a natural limitation, there is something appeasing, almost mystic about it. This is an eternal truth: veritas aeterna. Catholicism itself, which depends on revelation, declares: Deus impossibilia non jubet.

God does not ask the impossible. But this is where the second sight becomes active. Suddenly the underground man rises up, the underground man who had declared himself, with such dreadful honesty, to be the vilest of men. He does not know himself by what right he appears, but suddenly with hitter, savage, frightful voice (everything about the underground man is frightful), with a voice not his own (for the underground man's voice, like his sight, is not his own), he cries:

"It is false - it is a lie - God asks the impossible. God asks nothing but the impossible. You all give way before the wall, and see in it something appeasing and final - even, like the Catholics, something mystic. But I tell you that your wall, your impossible is only an excuse, a pretext, and that your God, the God who does not ask the impossible, is not God but a vile idol, one of those useful idols, be they great or small, beyond which you never have proceeded and never will proceed. Metaphysics is impossible! Then I will never think or speak of anything else.

I have a friend, gentlemen. When he is preparing to act he explains to you clearly in great and beautiful phrases, how he has to act, according to the rules of reason and truth. More than that: he will tell you with passion of the normal and real interests of humanity; he will laugh at the short-sightedness of fools who understand neither their own interest, nor true goodness. But a quarter of

an hour afterwards, without any reason, impelled by something more powerful than interest, he will commit some folly, that is to say, he will act contrary to all the rules that he has quoted, contrary to reason and contrary to his own interest; in a word, contrary to everything."

What is this "everything"? What is this interior impulse more powerful than any interest? "Everything", to speak in scholarly language, is the laws of reason and the sum of "evidences". The interior impulse is the "irrational residue" which is beyond the limits of possible experience. For this experience, which, according to Kant (Kant is a generic name, it is "omnitude" or all of us), is the root of all knowledge from which our science has issued, does not and will not hold within its limits this impulse, this intimate thing of which Dostoevsky speaks. Kant's "experience" is the collective experience of humanity, and only a hasty, commonplace explanation can confuse it with the facts of material and spiritual existence. In other words, this "experience" necessarily presupposes finished theory, a system of rules and laws of which Kant has very truly said that it is not nature which has imposed them on man, but on the contrary, man who has dictated them to nature. But this is where that scholastic philosophy diverges from Dostoevsky's aspirations, and their incomprehension becomes mutual.

Directly Kant hears the word "law" pronounced he takes his hat off; he neither wishes nor dares to dispute. He who says "law" says "power"; he who says "power" says "submission " - for man's supreme virtue is to submit himself.

But it is evidently not a living individual who dictates its laws to nature. Such an individual is himself part of nature and therefore subject to it. The supreme, ultimate, definitive power belongs to "man as such", that is to say, to an ideal principle equally far removed from the living individual and from inanimate nature. In other words, principle, rule, and law govern everything. Kant's thought could have been expressed as follows, in a more adequate though less striking form:

"It is neither nature nor man who dictates the laws, but the laws are dictated to man and to nature by the laws themselves. In other words: in the beginning was the law."

If Kant had formulated thus his fundamental principle, he would have been nearer to the scientific conception of the universe which he wished to justify, and also to that common sense which gave rise to this conception. The divergence between theoretical reason and practical reason would then have been eliminated and the ideal of philosophy attained, which is "so to act that the principle of your conduct can be made a general rule". So it is the "rule" which justifies conduct, just as it is the rule which expresses the truth. Nature as well as morality has sprung from rules and autonomous, self-sufficient principles, which alone possess a reality transcending experience, and standing outside time. I repeat:

Kant did not invent this himself; he simply formulated more clearly the general tendencies of scientific thought. The choruses of free, invisible, capricious individual spirits with which mythology had peopled the world were deposed by science and replaced by other phantoms, by immutable principles; and this was declared to be the final rout of antique superstition. Such is the essence of idealism; this is what modern thought looks upon as its supreme triumph.

Though Dostoevsky had received no scientific education, he understood with extraordinary perspicacity how he was to put the fundamental philosophic question: Is metaphysics possible as a science?

But, firstly, why need metaphysics be a science? And secondly, what meaning has this word "possible"? Science presupposes as its necessary condition, what Dostoevsky called ¡®omnitude": the existence of judgments which are universally admi

tted. Such judgments exist, they are immensely privileged, supernaturally so, as against the judgments which have not been universally admitted; they alone bear the title of "truths". Dostoevsky understood quite well why science and common sense are always searching for necessary and universally acknowledged judgments.

The "facts" in themselves are of no use to us. If we have remarked that a stone is warmed by the sun, that a piece of wood floats in water, that a mouthful of water quenches thirst, what can we do with such observations? Science has no use for particular facts, is not even interested in them. It only looks for that which can miraculously transform some particular fact into "experience" - when we acquire the right to say: the sun always warms stones; wood never sinks in water, water invariably quenches thirst, etc., then only do we possess scientific knowledge. In other words: knowledge only becomes true knowledge when out of the particular facts we have extracted the pure principle, that invisible "always", that all-powerful phantom which has inherited the power and the right of the gods and demons exiled from the world.

The moral world shows us the same thing as the physical world. There, too, principles occupy the position of gods; destroy principles and all will be confusion, there will be neither good nor evil. As in the physical world, if the laws were to disappear, anything might give rise to anything else. The very conceptions of good and evil, of truth and error, are based on the existence of a fixed, eternal order. This is what science is seeking to show when it creates its theories. If we know that the sun cannot fail to warm a stone, that wood cannot sink in water, that water necessarily quenches thirst, if it is therefore possible to advance the observed fact into a theory by putting it under the safeguard of some invisible but eternal law, which had no beginning and therefore can never end, then we have science. And it is the same thing with morality; it, too, has no support except in law: all men must act in such a way that their behaviour shows their perfect submission to rule. Only on this condition is social life possible.

Dostoevsky understood all this quite well, although he was so ignorant of the history of philosophy that he imagined that the idea of "pure reason" as the only omnipotent lord of the universe was quite a recent invention, the creation of Claude Bernard: and that quite recently, again, someone (probably this same Claude Bernard) had imagined a new science of "ethics" which definitely proclaimed that this same "law" was the only master of man, and had ousted once and for all the God of our forefathers.

Dostoevsky intentionally puts these philosophical ideas into the mouth of his ignorant Dimitri Karamazov. All the educated people, even Ivan Karamazov, are of Claude Bernard's point of view, and subscribe to his "ethics" and his "laws of nature". It could not escape Dostoevsky's clear vision that scientific training of the intelligence paralyzes the human powers to a certain extent and confines us within limitations. He may, of course, also have found all this in the Bible. Who has not read, or does not know the Bible? Claude Bernard and his teachers had undoubtedly read the Bible. But would they have gone to that book in search of philosophical truths? A book which was written by ignorant men, hardly touched by culture? Dostoevsky could see no alternative. And so, like St. Augustine, he was obliged to cry: Surgunt indocti et rapiunt caelum. Risen we know not whence, the ignorant have stormed heaven.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Conquest of the Self-Evident

<< | >>

6

Surgunt indocti et rapiunt caelum! To take heaven by storm, one must give up the learning, the first principles which we imbibed with our mother's milk. More than this: we must, as these quotations prove, renounce ideas altogether; that is, we must doubt their marvelous power to transform facts into theories. Scientific thought has given ideas this supreme prerogative: they are to judge and decide what is possible and what impossible, they are to fix the limit between reality and dreams, between good and evil, between what may, and what may not be done.

We may remember with what fury the underground man flung himself at the throat of self-evident truths, proud in the consciousness of their own intangible sovereign rights. Listen to this too, but forget that you are now concerned merely with a despicable little Petersburg official. Dostoevsky's dialectic in The Notes from Underground, as in his other works, can hold its own with that of any of the great European philosophers, and for courage of thought, I dare assert that only a few geniuses can hold a candle to him. And he is one with the great saints in his contempt of self.

"To go on with the people with strong nerves... these gentlemen immediately prostrate themselves before the impossible. Impossibility, therefore stone wall. What stone wall? Why, natural laws, of course, conclusions of the natural sciences and of mathematics. If, for example, they prove to you that you are descended from monkeys, it is no good wrinkling your nose, you have to accept it. If they prove that one atom of your own fat must be dearer to you than a hundred thousand of your neighbour's, you must accept it, there is no help. Try to argue with them. I beg your pardon, they will say, it ¡®s impossible to argue - twice two is four. Nature doesn't bother about your consent. It doesn't consider your wishes or stop to think whether you are pleased or not with its laws. You are obliged to accept it, with all its consequences, just as it is. A wall is a wall, etc. But good heavens, what have I to do with the laws of nature or arithmetic if, for some reason, these laws do not please me? Naturally I shall not run my head against that wall if I haven't sufficient strength to demolish it; but I shall not become reconciled to it simply because it is built on twice two is four! What an absurdity of absurdities! It is a different matter to understand everything, to take account of all the impossibilities and all the stone walls, not to bow down before them if they disgust us, to arrive, by the most inevitable of logical processes, at the hateful conclusion that we are ourselves in some way to blame for the stone wall - although it is again absolutely clear that we are in no way to blame; and consequently, in silence and with impotent grinding of the teeth, to lapse into a voluptuous inertia, and dream that we cannot even revolt against any one whatsoever, for there is no one and there will never be any one; that it is all probably a farce, a trick, an absurd rigmarole, one knows not what nor whence. But in spite of all these incomprehensible things we shall suffer, and the less we understand the worse it will be."

But perhaps the reader has already wearied of following Dostoevsky's thought, and his desperate efforts to overthrow invincible proof. We do not know whether he is speaking seriously or laughing at us. Can one really do anything but bow down before a wall? Can we oppose our little feeble "egos" against nature, which acts without a thought of us, and have we the added assurance to qualify the judgment which denies the possibility of this as "the last absurdity"?

But Dostoevsky does allow himself to ask just this very question: whether our reason has any right to judge between the possible and the impossible. The th

eory of knowledge does not ask this question, for if reason has not the right to judge between possibility and impossibility, to whom can that right belong? Without it everything would be possible and everything impossible. And Dostoevsky, as though making fun of us, also admits that he has not got the strength to knock down the wall. Consequently he admits a certain limit, a certain impossibility. Why, then, did he say exactly the opposite a minute ago? But in this way we shall fall into absolute chaos, not only chaos but nothingness, in which not only rules, laws, and ideas will disappear, but the whole of reality with them! But if we go beyond certain limits we shall clearly have to face even this. A man who has freed himself from the frightful tyranny of ideas imposed from outside, sets forth into such strange and unexplored countries, places so unknown that it must seem to him he has left reality behind and entered upon the eternal void.

Dostoevsky was not the first to live through this unimaginably terrible passage from one world to another and to find himself obliged to abandon the stability which "principles" give. Fifteen hundred years earlier Plotinus, who had also tried to transcend our experience, tells that at the first moment one has an impression that everything is disappearing, and has an overwhelming fear that only pure nothingness is left. I should add that Plotinus has not told the whole truth; he has hidden the most important thing: it is not only the first stage that is like this, but also the second and all the following stages. The soul, thrown outside its normal limits, cannot free itself of this terror, whatever may be said about the ecstatic joys which it experiences. Joy does not exclude terror here. The states are organically bound up with one another: in order to have great joy there must also be hideous horror. A truly supernatural effort is required for a man to summon up the courage to oppose his "ego" to the world, to nature, to supreme evidence: the "whole" will not concern itself with me, but I refuse equally to pay attention to the "whole". Let the whole triumph! Dostoevsky even finds a sort of delight in telling us of his constant defeats and miseries. No one before him, and none since, has described with such desperate fullness all the humiliations, all the sufferings of a soul crushed by the weight of "self-evidence". He cannot rest until he has torn from himself this desperate confession: "Can a man who has looked into his own soul, really respect himself?"

Who can, in fact, respect weakness and triviality? The whole book is a record of impotence and humiliation. The underground man is flouted, driven away, beaten; and he seems only to look for further opportunities to suffer. The more he is offended, in fact, the more he is humiliated, the more he is crushed, the nearer does he come to his objective, to escape from the "cave"; from that bewitched country where laws, principles, and evidences reign, from the ideal country of sane and normal men. The underground man is the most unhappy, the most miserable, and the most pitiable of men. But the "normal" man, that is to say, the man who lives in this same underworld, but does not even suspect that it is an underworld and is convinced that his life is the true and only life, and his science the most perfect, his good absolute good, that he is the alpha and omega, the beginning and end of all things - this man provokes Homeric laughter even in the underground regions themselves.

Read what Dostoevsky has to say about normal men, and then ask yourself which is better: the painful convulsions of a doubtful awakening, or the grey, yawning torpidity of certain sleep. Then the opposition of one against the whole world will not seem so paradoxical to you. In spite of all the apparent absurdity of this opposition, it is less absurd than the apotheosis of "omnitude", of that golden mean in which alone our science and our "good" can develop.

Aristotle's biographer (when Dostoevsky speaks of Claude Bernard he actually means Aristotle) has called him "moderate to excess". In fact Aristotle was the genius, the incomparable singer of "omnitude", of the golden mean and of mediocrity. He was the first firmly to establish the principle that "limitation is the index of perfection". He created the ideal system of knowledge and of ethics w

hich has served as model ever since. When, in the Middle Ages, the "limits of possible experience" seemed to expand more or less indefinitely, human thought clung firmly to Aristotelian philosophy; and this was of course, no accident. Aristotle was as indispensable to the theologians as the organization of the Roman Empire was to the Papacy. Catholicism was and had to be a complexio oppositorum. But for the moderating influence of Aristotle and the Roman jurisconsults, it would never have obtained the victory on earth.

It may be apposite to remark here that Dostoevsky does not stand alone in Russian literature. One must put Gogol before and even above him. All Gogol's works, The Inspector General, The Wedding and Dead Souls, even the early stories in which he describes Ukrainian life in so gay and colorful fashion, are but the memoirs of an underground man. When Pushkin read Gogol, he exclaimed: "My God, what a tragic thing is Russia!" But it was not only Russia that Gogol had in mind: the whole world seemed to him bewitched. Dostoevsky understood this when he said: "Gogol's works crush us beneath the weight of the unanswerable questions which they put to us."

"How dreary it is to be alive, gentlemen!" This cry of distress which Gogol let fall, as though involuntarily, does not apply to Russian life only. It is dreary to be alive, not only because there are too many Chichikovs, Nosdrevs, Sobakeviches in the world. Chichikov and Sobakevich were not "they" to Gogol, not "other people" who had to be raised up to his own standard. He tells us himself, and it was not hypocritical humility but the grim truth, that it is himself and not others that he describes and ridicules in The Inspector-General and Dead Souls. Gogol's works remain a book with seven seals to us so long as we refuse to admit the truth of his confession. Not the worst among us, but the best are only living automata, which a mysterious hand has wound up and which never anywhere or in any place feel themselves free to express their own initiative and their own free will. Some of us, but they are rare, feel that our life is not life but death. But even they, like Gogol's phantoms, are able to escape only from time to time, at midnight, from their tombs, to come and disturb their neighbour's with their heartrending cries of, "I am stifled! Stifled!"

Gogol himself realized that he was like Vii, the huge, shapeless earth-spirit, whose eyelids reached to the ground, and who was unable to raise them even an inch, even to see that strip of blue sky that was visible to the wretched inmates of The House of the Dead. These works, sparkling with wit and humor, are really terrible tragedies; and Gogol felt his own existence to be a tragedy too. He, too, had been visited by the Angel of Death, who gave him the accursed gift of second sight. But is this gift not a blessing rather than a curse? If one could only answer this question! But the whole meaning of second sight lies in asking those questions to which there is no answer, precisely because they demand so imperiously an immediate answer.

Legions of demons and powerful spirits could not raise Vii's eyelids from the earth. Nor could Gogol himself open his eyes, though his whole being concentrated on the effort. He was only capable of torturing himself, of suffering martyrdom, and of giving himself over to the hands of the moral executioner Father Matthew (Gogol's confessor); of destroying his own best work and writing crazy letters to his friends.

It seems that in a certain sense this thirst for suffering, this extraordinary spiritual asceticism, is more necessary than his splendid literary productions. There is perhaps another means of freeing oneself from the power of" omnitude". Gogol does not use this word. Gogol had never heard of Claude Bernard and certainly had no suspicion that Aristotle had bewitched the world by means of the law of contradiction and the other self-evident truths. Gogol had received no education and was almost as indoctus as the Galilean fishermen and carpenters of whom St. Augustine speaks. But yet, in spite of that, or just because of that, he

feels even more bitterly than Dostoevsky the absolute power which pure reason wields over the whole world, and the tyranny of the ideas which the normal, moderate man has created, and which the theoretical philosophy that has accepted the heritage of Aristotle has developed and spread abroad.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Conquest of the Self-Evident

<< | >>

7

I have already had occasion to point out that the best and only complete definition of philosophy is to be found in Plotinus. To the question, "What is philosophy?" he replies, to timi§ætaton, "what matters most".

In the first place this definition destroys, apparently quite without premeditation, those barriers which in ancient times separated philosophy from the cognate provinces of religion and art; for the artist and the prophet are in fact also seeking to timi§ætaton. But apart from this, not only does it not submit philosophy to the control and direction of science; it sets the one in direct opposition to the other. Science is objective, indifferent; it does not consider whether a thing matters or not. It coldly casts its eye over the innocent and the guilty alike, knowing neither pity nor anger. But where there is no pity or indignation, where the innocent and the guilty are alike regarded with indifference, where all "phenomena" are merely classified and not qualified, there can be no distinctions between the important and the insignificant. It follows that philosophy, defined as to timi§ætaton, is in no sense science. I would go further. It must necessarily clash with science precisely when the question of sovereignty arises.

Science pretends to the certainty, the universality, and the necessity of its statements. That is its strength, its historical significance, and its great charm. I repeat: those scientists - and they are many - who imagine that they only "collect and describe facts" are profoundly mistaken. Facts in themselves are of no use to science, even to such sciences as zoology, botany, history, or geography. What science wants is theory, something which will transform in wondrous wise what happened once, by what to ordinary eyes appeared a chance, into necessity. To deny science this supreme right is to depose it from its pedestal, to render it impotent. The simplest description of the simplest fact presupposes a supreme prerogative - that of the Last Judgment. Science does not state, it judges. It does not reflect truth, it creates it according to the autonomous laws which it has itself created. In other words, science is life set before the tribunal of reason. Reason decides what may and what may not be. It decides - and this is a point which must never be forgotten - according to its own laws, taking no account of what it calls the "human, all too human."

Matter and energy are indestructible, but Socrates and Giordano Bruno are destructible, says reason. And all bow down to the dictum without a word; no one dares even hazard the question: Why has reason decreed this law? Why is it so paternally occupied in safeguarding matter and energy when it has forgotten all about Socrates and Giordano Bruno? Still less do they think of asking another question. Let us admit that reason has proclaimed this revolting law, disregarding all that is sacred to man, to timi§ætaton; but whence does it derive the strength needful to accomplish this decision? And to accomplish it so perfectly that in no s

ingle instance since the beginning of the world has a single atom disappeared completely; that not only no gram of energy - not a fraction of a gram has vanished into space? This is a miracle indeed, the more so because ultimately reason has no actual existence either. Try to find it, to point it out; you cannot. It accomplishes miracles like the most real of beings; but it has no existence. And all of us, who are used to questioning everything, admit this miracle quite easily; for science, created by reason, pays us a good price; out of worthless "facts", it creates "experience", through which we become masters of nature. Reason has taken man up into an exceeding high mountain and shown him all the kingdoms of the world, and has said unto him: All these things will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me. And man has worshipped, and obtained the promised reward (though, to be sure, not fully).

Since that day the worship of reason has been regarded as man's first duty. And any other relationship to reason seems to us unthinkable, in some sense impossible. Regarding God there is a commandment: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul." Reason does without commandments, men will love it of themselves, unbidden. The theory of knowledge simply sings the praises of reason, but no one has the audacity to question it, and still less dare doubt its sovereign power. The miracle of the transformation of facts into "experience" has conquered all minds; all admit that reason is judge and is itself subject to no other jurisdiction.

Dostoevsky, thanks to his second sight, soon saw that the experience from which men derive their science is a theory and not a reality. And no success, no conquest, no miracle even, can justify theory. He put the question: has "omnitude", common consciousness (from which self-evidence springs) any right to the high prerogatives which it has arrogated to itself? In other words: has reason any right to judge autonomously, rendering account to none; or are we only dealing with an usurpation of rights sanctified by centuries of possession?

Dostoevsky looks on the case between the living individual on the one hand, and common consciousness on the other, not so much as one of facts as of rights. "Omnitude" has usurped the power. We must wrest it away; and if we are to accomplish this, the first step is to cease to believe in the legitimacy of the usurpation, and to tell ourselves that its strength lies only in our belief in its strength. "Natural laws" and their inimitability, truths and the self-evidence thereof, are perhaps only magic, auto-suggestion, or influences from outside which hypnotize us as a goose is hypnotized if we trace round her a circle of chalk. The goose will not be able to get out of the circle, as though it were a wall that surrounded her, instead of merely a line. If the goose knew how to reason and express her thoughts in words, she would create a theory of knowledge, and hold forth on self-evidence, holding the line of chalk to be the limit of possible experience. But if this is the case, our warfare against the principles of scientific knowledge must be waged not with arguments but with other weapons. Arguments served only so long as we admitted the truth of the premises from which they follow, but if we do not admit them we must seek something else.

"'Twice two is four', gentlemen, is not life, it is the beginning of death - at any rate, man has always been afraid of this 'twice two is four', and I am still afraid of it now. It is true that man thinks of nothing else but the search for this 'twice two is four'; he will cross oceans, risk his life in order to find it, but as for discovering what it really is when he has found it - that frightens him, I promise you. But in my opinion 'twice two is four' is simply an impertinence - 'Twice two is four' is a lout; he plants himself across our path, arms akimbo, and spits on the ground. I admit that 'twice two is four' is an excellent thing, but if we are to praise all that is praiseworthy, I will tell you that 'twice two is five' is also a charming thing."

You are not accustomed to such arguments against philosophical theories; perhaps

you are even incensed that when discussing the theory of knowledge I should quote these passages from Dostoevsky. You would be right, these arguments would really be out of place, if Dostoevsky had not raised the question of right and usurpation. But that is the point. "Twice two is four", and reason and all its proofs simply will not admit discussion of the question of rights. They cannot, for if they once admit it they are lost. They refuse to be judged, they wish to be both judge and law-giver, and whosoever would refuse them this right, him they will anathematize and excommunicate from the ecumenical human church. With this all possibility of discussion ceases, and a desperate and mortal struggle begins.

The underground man is outlawed in reason's name. Laws, as we know, protect only matter, energy, and principles. There is nothing keeping guard over Socrates, Giordano Bruno, or any man great or small. And then a man, a miserable, humiliated, pitiable man, dares to rise up in defence of himself and his so-called rights. And behold, the glance of this miserable little functionary is deeper and more piercing than that of the famous scholars. Generally speaking, the philosopher fights against materialism and feels proud indeed if he succeeds in collecting a few more or less cogent arguments with which to confront his opponent. But Dostoevsky, who went no further than Claude Bernard, does not even deign to argue with the materialists; he knows that materialism is powerless in itself, that it only borrows strength from idealism, from ideas, i.e., from that reason which admits nothing else above itself. But how can the tyrant be overthrown? What methods can one invent? Do not forget that it is impossible to argue with reason. All arguments are rational arguments, which exist only to sustain the pretensions of reason. There is only one weapon: mockery, invective, a categorical "no" to all the demands of reason. To reason which created rules, and gives its sanctions to normal men, Dostoevsky replies:

"Why are you so unshakably, so solemnly convinced that only the normal is needed, only the positive, only what conduces to well-being? Cannot reason be wrong? It may well be that man loves other things besides well-being. Does he not love suffering just as well... ? Sometimes a man will passionately love suffering. This is a fact. There is no need to refer you to the history of the world. Ask yourself, if you have really lived. For my own part, I find it rather repellent to love nothing but well-being. Whether it is right or wrong I do not know, but it is sometimes very pleasant to destroy something. I am not really now defending either suffering or well-being, but I am defending my own caprice and the right to enjoy it if I want. I know, for example, that sufferings will not be admitted in a comedy. Nor are they permissible in a glass palace. Suffering is a doubt, a negation, and what would a glass palace be in which one doubted? But I am sure that man will never give up true suffering, that is to say, destruction and chaos."

The most subtle proofs, elaborated through thousands of years by theories of knowledge, must vanish in the face of such arguments as these. It is no longer law or principle which exact and obtain the guarantees, it is caprice, which by its very nature, as every one knows, is unable, either to give or receive guarantees of any sort. To deny this is to deny self-evidence. But this, as I have already told you, is precisely what Dostoevsky is engaged in doing; combating self-evidence. Our self-evidence is only auto-suggested, even as our life, he continually repeats, is not life but death. But if you want to understand Dostoevsky, you must always keep his fundamental thesis in mind; "twice two is four", is a principle of death. We must choose: either we must upset this twice two is four, or we must admit that death is the end of life and the last judgment on it.

Here lies the source of Dostoevsky's hatred of well-being, of balance, of satisfaction; and hence his fantastic paradox: man loves suffering -

"You can say anything about the history of the world; anything that the wildest brain can conceive, but you cannot pretend one thing: that it is reasonable.

Your tongue would refuse to utter the words."

Here, indeed, we must correct the underground man - he has made a mistake in facts, a mistake which tends to weaken rather than strengthen his "argument". It is quite untrue that we cannot say that world history has developed in accordance with the rules of reason and that the tongue of him who maintained this would refuse to speak. How many people have not said as much! Whole volumes have been written on the subject; eloquent, searching works. A philosophy of history has been created in which it has been demonstrated almost mathematically that there is a certain rational idea at the basis of all historical development. Hegel has achieved immortality through his philosophy of history, and who, since his day, has ever had any difficulty in enunciating the word "progress"? And the theodicies? Was it not man who invented theodicy, which is, after all, a philosophy of history? And did Leibniz's theodicy do any less for his reputation than Hegel's philosophy of history for his? Is it not written fluently? Did his tongue refuse to utter, even once? Why do I say Leibniz? Was not the divine Plotinus himself the father of theodicy? Plotinus, who proclaimed to mankind his ineffable visions, those visions which are revealed only to those who transcend in ecstasy the limits of experience possible to "omnitude".

The etymological significance of the word theodicy is "justification of God", but with Leibniz, who followed Plotinus closely, and with Plotinus himself, it was not God who was justified by theodicy, but "twice two is four". In so far as Plotinus, as a teacher and representative of a school of philosophy, submitted loyally to reason, he could have no other object. It was not caprice which he wished to safeguard; caprice, the free will of the individual, is the source of all evil on earth, as he repeats almost mechanically, after all his predecessors. According to the tradition of the schools, caprice must be destroyed, annihilated, dissolved into a principle. Thus in his theodicy, which served as a model for all succeeding theodicies, Plotinus's sole preoccupation is to show that principles cannot be upset, whatever happens in the world. Men are born and die, they appear and disappear, but "twice two is four" is eternal, it always has been and always will be. Caprice, too, was born once; it was not, and then it appeared; therefore, it is obvious that it can have no guarantee, no protection from reason. Even its very birth was rather an act of audacity, of impiety. But impiety is always followed, sooner or later, by its punishment; the law of Nemesis or Adrasteia is pitiless, as befits a law of nature.

Accordingly, the question of the fate of individuals and even of races takes a second place in Plotinus' theodicy. If a man has become a slave, if he suffers injury, if he loses friends, and even fatherland, it is in the natural order of things. What he suffers is individual, accidental, capricious; therefore, no question arises; any question would even be out of place. Questions only arise when the principle is affected. Only the principle, this same "twice two is four", is worthy of protection and guarantee, and does in fact obtain them.

You may be ruined, injured, made to suffer; Adrasteia cares nothing for it. If it is an animal or a natural catastrophe which is the cause of your misfortune, it will produce no reaction in the world, and no one will come to your help. For reason has not decreed that man shall not suffer or perish. But should a man in some way fall foul of the "law"; should he have taken something from his neighbour, struck him or made him suffer in some way far less acute than the suffering to which we are continually subjected by the "caprices" of nature, that cannot be forgiven. Unsleeping Adrasteia watches to see that no infringement of the law goes unpunished; it does not matter about the victim, she pays no heed to him; but she strikes the author of the crime. If you kill, you will be reincarnated after your death, and you in your turn will be killed in this second incarnation; if you have robbed you will be robbed, if you have violated you will be reborn a woman and suffer the same. violation, and so on through all the list of crimes down to the most insignificant.

The important thing is not the suffering of the man you have robbed, or the woman you have dishonoured; suffering and enduring are the lot of humanity; there is no harm in that, no one can be troubled to repair the offense. The evil lies in the fact that the offender has broken the law. This is absolutely inadmissible, and demands compensation. In the material, as well as in the ideal world, everything is balanced; even the idea of balance has been borrowed by the material world from the world of ideas. It is extraordinary that Plotinus, whose intelligence was so acute, did not realize that the ever-watchful activities of Adrasteia did more than guarantee the balance; they also ensured the inevitable increase of evil in the universe. Balance demands that every crime should be compensated by another crime, so that all evil in this way becomes perpetuated. If I have killed I shall be killed, but my murderer will perish in his turn and so on eternally. But since in addition to the crimes perpetuated by Adrasteia there can be others also, it is obvious that each generation must necessarily be more criminal than its predecessor.

I do not know what Plotinus would have answered if his attention had been drawn to this circumstance. Most probably it would not have disturbed him in the least. The principle of "twice two is four", of balance, has been respected, the tribute due to reason has been paid. What more can one ask?

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Conquest of the Self-Evident

<< | >>

8

As a matter of fact, so long as we keep within the bounds of reason, within the limits in which life is set for common consciousness or omnitude, our understanding, our interpretation of what is happening around us is reduced to purely mechanical explanations. In the material world it is balance, in the moral world justice, which is only the same balance under another name. And the philosophy which aims at being a science cares only about solving the equation in which the universe explains itself to our intelligence in such a fashion that when the unknown quantities are found, the result shall work out exactly. No sacrifice is thought too great to achieve this object, which is held to be so indisputable that it is looked upon as the first condition, not only of thought but also of existence. To ensure that the balance be not destroyed, it is put in charge of the immortal and terrible Adrasteia. Verily this is no longer natural; it is the miracle of miracles. While it is only a question of "twice two is four", while we are still only dealing with abstract figures, it is all right. Here the invariability of the halves of the equation is to some extent guaranteed by common consent, by a sort of tacit social contract. But this does not satisfy science. It is not satisfied with reigning in the ideal world created by man. It wants also to rule in the world of reality; as in Pushkin's story, it wants the golden fish himself to be its servant, so it invents an Adrasteia who watches over the balance so dear to our reason. And science succeeds in doing this so inconspicuously, places the goddess at such a distance from the world of phenomena over which she is to rule, that no one suspects anything supernatural about the affair. The extreme of arbitrariness thus passes as natural necessity. Dostoevsky had to escape beyond all limits, to be in "ecstasy", before he dared see that Adrasteia's pretensions were "impudence", just as Plotinus had to be in ecstasy before he could

free himself from the grasp of philosophical self-evidence.

Even today we hardly know, when reading Dostoevsky, whether we really have the right to protest against "twice two is four", or whether we should continue to bow the knee before it. Dostoevsky himself was not sure whether he had laid his enemy by the heels or whether he had succumbed again to the power of the law. He did not know it for certain to his last days. Having escaped from common consciousness, he had become involved in a labyrinth of endless intricacy, he could no longer judge for himself and did not even know whether this was a gain or a loss. He was obliged to seek out the most "dangerous absurdities", the most "uneconomic nonsense", simply in order to introduce a "fantastic and pernicious" element into all this wisdom.

A fantastic element! In other words, the problem with which he wrestled was not the natural order, determined once and for all, and therefore presumably intelligible, but Adrasteia herself with her eternal enigmas, her insoluble mysteries. The science created by common consciousness, banishes Adrasteia from sight, with all her caprices, fancies and miracles, and for the sake of a "quiet life", pretends that there is nothing miraculous or fantastic in the world. Dostoevsky hated "quiet" and all the benefits which "order" can procure for mankind. Therefore, neither our theory of knowledge nor our logic were able to impose on him in any way. He makes every effort, not to justify, but to upset all our self-evidence.

"You believe in your glass palace, for ever indestructible, an edifice, therefore, at which one cannot so much as put out one's tongue, or clench one's fist even inside one's pocket. As for me, I mistrust this edifice perhaps just because it is of glass, indestructible for all time, and because one cannot put out one's tongue at it. You see, if instead of a glass palace, I possess a chicken-house, and it comes on to rain, perhaps I should slip into this chicken-house not to get wet; but though I might be grateful to it for keeping me dry, I should not look upon my chicken-house as a glass palace. You laugh, you say that in these circumstances palace and chicken-house are of equal value. Yes, I should reply, if you lived for nothing but to escape getting wet. But what if I had taken it into my head that one does not live for this alone, and that if one lives at all, one ought to live in a palace."

As befits a man from underground, he furnishes no proof. He knows quite well that if it comes to proofs, reason will triumph. Who ever heard of such an argument? To put out your tongue, to clench your fist! You revolt against it. How can one call such a proceeding "an argument" and insist that science should take account of it? But the underground man does not ask that account should be taken of him; and perhaps that is the most remarkable aspect of his personality. He realizes that universal recognition will give him nothing, and he has no thought of convincing others. He does not want to inscribe his thought on coming centuries, as on a tablet of stone; he does not try to direct history. His interests are foreign to "omnitude", and consequently foreign to history.

"You laugh again", he says. "Laugh if you want to. I will accept all your mockeries, and yet I shall refuse to declare myself satisfied when I am hungry, I know still that I will not be pacified into a compromise. I will not admit that a vast slum tenement is the object of my desire. And although you do not regard me, yet I shall not burst into tears on that account. I have got my underworld, and so long as I exist or have a will of my own, may my hand wither before I carry a single brick to that house. Do not remind me that I have given up the glass palace of my own free will for the sole reason that I could not put out my tongue at it. I did not say that because I have any burning wish to put out my tongue. Perhaps what annoys me is just the fact that of all your buildings, up to now, there has not been one single one at which one needed to put out one's tongue."

The underground man has no clear and definite object. He longs, ardently, passionately, madly, but he does not know, and he will never know, what it is for which he longs. Now he declares that he will never give up the pleasure of putting out his tongue, now he says that he has no particular wish to mock. At one moment he will say that the underworld amply suffices for him, he wants nothing more; the next he will consign it to the devil. Suddenly he launches into this wild tirade.

"So, long live the underworld! I did indeed say that I envy the normal man with the last drop of my bile; but when I see him as he is, I have no wish to be in his place (though all the while I shall go on envying him). No, no! when all is said and done, underground is better! There one can at least... Ah! but I am lying again. I am lying because I know quite clearly myself, as well as I know that "twice two is four", that it is not underground that is worth so much, but some quite different place which I ardently desire, but shall never find. To the devil with underground!"

What happens to the mind of the underground man has no resemblance at all to thinking, nor even to seeking. He does not think, he excites himself desperately, throws himself about, knocks his head against the wall. He inflames himself the whole time, dashing up to unknown heights of fury, to fling himself into God knows what abysses of despair. He has no control of himself; a force far greater than himself has him completely under its sway.

"If only I myself believed a single word of what I have written here! I swear to you, gentlemen, that I do not believe a word, a single word of what I have put down here. That is to say, perhaps I believe it, but at the same time I feel and suspect, I do not know why, that I am lying like a trooper."

He to whom the Angel of Death has given the mysterious gift, does not and cannot any longer possess the certainty which accompanies our ordinary judgments and confers a beautiful solidity on the truths of our common consciousness. Henceforth he must live without certainty and without conviction. He will have to give his mind over into strange keeping, become inert matter, clay of which the potter must shape what he will. This is the only thing of which the underground man can be absolutely certain. He sees that neither the works of reason nor any human works can save him. He has passed under review, with what carefulness, with what superhuman effort, everything that man can accomplish by the use of his reason, all the glass palaces, and has seen that they were not palaces but chicken-houses and ant-heaps; for they were built on the principle of death, on "twice two is four". And the more he feels this, the more violently there wells up from the depth of his soul that more than rational, unknown, that primal chaos, which most of all horrifies our ordinary consciousness. That is why, in his "theory of knowledge", Dostoevsky renounces all certainty, and opposes to it as his supreme goal - uncertainty. That is why he simply puts out his tongue at evidence, why he lauds caprice, unconditional, unforeseen, always irrational, and makes mock of all the human virtues.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Conquest of the Self-Evident

<< | >>

9

The House of the Dead, and The Notes from Underground, are the sources from which all Dostoevsky's other works are derived. The great novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, The Brothers Karamazov, are merely a series of vast commentaries on these two works. It is always a matter of confronting natural vision with the supernatural vision which is the gift of the Angel of Death. Self-evidence, authoritative as ever, exacts recognition and submission from Dostoevsky. For him, too, the circle of chalk is a wall which it is impossible to displace and impossible to break. "Twice two is four " always constitutes an eternal law which is fully conscious of its rights towards and against others, and fears neither mockery nor anger. Life goes on its way, normal men triumph, "science" develops and gathers strength, "balance" shows itself the supreme principle, superior even to Time the devourer. As for poor caprice, it goes on asking for some sort of guarantee, but all the guarantees have already been appropriated, and it is disregarded. Dostoevsky may say as loud as he likes: "Let the whole world perish, so long as I get my cup of tea!" The world remains in its place, while, as for the tea, sometimes one gets it, but more often not. And as for the glass palace, one must stop thinking about it; on all sides there are chicken-houses, ant-heaps, stables, and, to protect oneself against bad weather, one must slip under the first roof one sees, no matter how dirty.

It looks as though the time had long since come to give up the battle and yield to the victor's mercy. But Dostoevsky still has one last "argument" in reserve, which most people would find no more cogent than all the others. It sometimes happens that a man will prefer suffering to well-being, chaos and destruction may appeal to him more than order and creation. Dostoevsky never gives up this idea. All his work is inspired by it; one can always see traces of it, even in The Diary of a Writer. One might say that it is not really an idea, that it is always the same caprice which, one knows not why, has invested itself in the sumptuous garments of an idea, which are quite unsuitable to its humble character. It is impossible to deny that this gala dress is not becoming to Dostoevsky's argument. Although he constantly makes use of the word "idea", he has no right to it. All ideas have been left far behind with reason. Where reason no longer exists there can be chaos and caprice, but not ideas.

We see this already in Crime and Punishment. It seems that there is, and that there should be, some idea in the novel; even its title gives us the right to expect as much. Where there is crime there is punishment: this is an idea, and an idea perfectly comprehensible to normal consciousness. It is this re-establishment of antique justice, of balance, of principle, of watchful Adrasteia, of "twice two is four", of everything which the underground man derided so offensively. And it is a fact that whereas The Notes from Underground passed unnoticed, and is very little read to this day, Crime and Punishment had an enormous success and laid the foundation of Dostoevsky's literary fame. The story of Raskolnikov appeared perfectly obvious to every one; he wished to escape from common consciousness, and was changed, rightly, not into a god but into a wild beast. And he remained one so long as he "was not conscious of the lie that was in him and in his convictions". Only this consciousness, Dostoevsky explains, "can presage the crisis through which he has to pass to his future resurrection and his new conception of existence".

You catch here an echo of the sentiments that Dostoevsky has already described in The House of the Dead. Here is the same little corner of blue sky, full of promise, to be seen above the prison wall: here is the same free life among free men of which Dostoevsky dreamed in the convict settlement. He uses almost the same expressions.

"Raskolnikov came out of the shed, sat down by the banks of the river on the piles of wood disposed along the foot of the wall, and began to gaze at the wi

de, empty stream. A song from the other bank was hardly audible on this side. Over there on the boundless, sunlit steppe the tents of the nomads could be seen as little, almost imperceptible dots. Over there was liberty; other men lived there, who were quite different from the men over here; time itself seemed to stand still over there, as though the days of Abraham and his flocks had never passed away."

In this solemn hour, Sonia is by his side. For the second time in this novel, the murderer and the prostitute find themselves together. But the first time they had met to read the eternal scriptures together, and this time they are before the face of eternal nature. And a miracle occurs: "How it happened he did not know himself; something suddenly shook him and flung him at her feet. And he wept and embraced her knees."

Why "suddenly"? What does this "suddenly" mean? When Raskolnikov returned to the prison on the evening of the same day he naturally thought of what had happened. But he thought quite differently from the way that other men think. His thoughts pressed upon him in a disordered rush:

"All, even the crime, even the sentence and his banishment, now appeared to him in his transport, as a series of strange facts, exterior to himself, and as though they had happened to another man."

And, in fact, this "past" of Raskolnikov's, which Dostoevsky has described to us with such minute care, was not really Raskolnikov's past. He had a right to ask if it was really he who had killed the old woman Lisaveta? I do not think that any attentive reader of Dostoevsky, and least of all Dostoevsky himself, would have been able to answer this question in the affirmative. Perhaps he had killed her, or perhaps not. In either case, the important thing is not whether the crime had been committed or not what really matters is that the punishment did most certainly take place. In Dostoevsky's last novel, punishment strikes Dimitri Karamazov, who, the author tells us, was not guilty of the crime. And Dostoevsky triumphs: "the peasants did what was expected of them they condemned an innocent man.

Probably every one will agree with me that Raskolnikov was as little guilty of murder as Dimitri Karamazov. Or it would be better to say that neither Raskolnikov nor Dimitri Karamazov ever existed, and both were completely indifferent to Dostoevsky: "I am always telling of something different, something different, but I am speaking about myself. Of what else can an honest man speak but of himself?" Dostoevsky only spoke to us about himself. He always had the mad, hideous thought, which he never gave up, and which with unequaled cynicism he put into the mouths of the underground man: "Let the whole world perish so long as I get my cup of tea."

It is another case of this caprice demanding its guarantee, in whose name Dostoevsky declared his revolt against science; it is the little ugly duckling suddenly born in the midst of all the high and noble thoughts which lit the darkness of the convict prison with their pure radiance. Strange though it may be, one must admit that Dostoevsky always cherished the hope that his ugly duckling 'would one day be transformed into a beautiful swan. Long afterwards, when Dostoevsky was writing his Diary of a Writer, shortly before his death, and said that humanity had never had but one preoccupation, which was the immortality of the soul, he was only repeating the words of his underground hero. It is the same voice, the same persistence, the same convulsed face: "I declare that love of humanity is inconceivable, incomprehensible, and quite impossible without faith in the immortality of the soul."

Do you really not recognize this voice? Will you still maintain that Dostoevsky and his underground hero are not one and the same man? It is always the sam

e ugly little duckling. The beautiful swan is still a long way off, even though all the great novels, including The Brothers Karamazov, have already been written. One can still see the same ugly duckling in the speech which he made on the fiftieth anniversary of Pushkin, and in his polemic with Professor Gradovsky about this speech. The swan is still as far off as ever. But I am not expressing myself exactly. "Far off!" I ought rather to say that it is the effect of the double sight and the double organs of vision making itself felt. With his own eyes Dostoevsky can see the ugly duckling; but the other eyes, the eyes of the Angel, show him a beautiful swan. The fight between the natural and the supernatural vision never ceases for a moment; on the contrary,it grows increasingly bitter. The old vision demands proofs, it wants all impressions to harmonize with the testimony furnished by the other senses, it does not even understand or listen to the voice of reason. The law of contradiction is, naturally, furious, and the "old man" does not know what to do. Finally, he tries to~ reestablish peace in his soul, by giving special names to his contradictory ways of seeing things. He says: "My new eyes are not knowledge, they are faith." But reason is not appeased, for reason does not admit an autonomous faith. Reason lays claim to omnipotence and to the keys of heaven, and if faith wishes to be accepted, it must justify itself before reason and submit to its laws.

Dostoevsky, the same Dostoevsky who made such mock of the pretensions of reason in The Notes from Underground, and who made Claude Bernard (only as we know, it was not Claude Bernard, but Aristotle whom he meant) - made Claude Bernard and his science bow down to Dimitri Karamazov, an almost illiterate man, Dostoevsky, who said in The Idiot, "No reasoning can grasp the essence of religious feeling, there is something else there, something else over which atheists will always slide, without being able to penetrate to its heart" - this same Dostoevsky was himself unable to live in constant open warfare with reason. There were moments when he was oppressed by his second sight and by the state of continual questioning created by the contradictions which it provoked; at such times he turned from his supernatural vision and tried to recapture the harmony so necessary to mankind. These intervals are what reconciles the reader to his work nearly all the novels end with a perfect major chord which triumphantly solves all the torturing doubts that have arisen in the course of the book. This is the ending of Crime and Punishment:

"But here begins a new story, the story of the progressive renewal of the man, the story of his slow transformation, of his passage from one world to another, of the discovery which he made of a new and hitherto unknown reality. But that would be the subject of another story. Our story is ended."

Is it really ended? Yes, certainly, if a perfect major chord, and the promise to show us the passage to a new life, and a gradual one at that (that is to say, the most reasonable that one could imagine; for gradualness solves every mystery, every riddle, all caprice, all the unexpected, in a word, all that irrational and visionary side of life, of which Dostoevsky has told us so much) - if these are a reply to those crushing questions which have pursued us throughout the pages of the novel, then the author can honestly allow himself, not only to put a full stop and break off his story, but to write the word "finis".

But this promise was never realized. Fifteen years later, only a short time before his death, Dostoevsky once more repeats this same undertaking in The Brothers Karamazov; he realizes that it is time to fulfill his promise, but takes no step towards doing so. It is obvious that he has set himself an impossible task; slow and gradual transformations are possible, they even happen quite frequently, but they do not lead us to a new life; they only take us from one old life to another old life. The new life always makes itself known abruptly, without any approach or preparation, and it keeps its strange enigmatical character in the midst of events whose course has been determined by the old laws. Dostoevsky says of Raskolnikov that he severed the ties which bound him to other men as thoug

h he cut them with a knife. No earthly force could knit up again relations which had been so brutally destroyed. In Crime and Punishment, as in his other works, Dostoevsky makes the greatest efforts to make his underground man, i.e. himself, more normal; but the harder he tries the less he succeeds.

In The idiot, which was written immediately after Crime and Punishment, he wants to show us in Prince Myshkin a figure of that new life of which he had told us so much. The work is remarkable, but one does not see new life in it. Dostoevsky is unable to achieve it, for his second sight makes him see that on earth "everything has a beginning and nothing has an end." He repeats it constantly and at every opportunity, together with this other thought which is so dear to him: "Man loves destruction just as much as construction." But if this is so; if everything has a beginning and nothing has an end, if man loves destruction no less than construction - how, then, can there be a new life on earth? Indeed, look at the way Prince Myshkin lives and what he brings to mankind - and in the eyes of his author he is being transformed and renewed to his depths.

We find the same heavy, supersaturated atmosphere in The Idiot as in Dostoevsky's other novels. The author wants, as it were, to force into a story regulated and protected by the laws of contradiction and causality, events of the human soul which can have no place in it, in the secret hope that the laws, unable to resist this strong pressure from within, will suddenly break up and give way, and that he will then find the second dimension of time, where those things continue and conclude themselves invisibly, which now we can only perceive in the first dimension as beginning, but having no end.

Prince Myshkin meets Rogozhin and Ptitzyn one morning, in a railway carriage, and in the course of the same day, makes the acquaintance of almost all the innumerable characters of the novel. Event succeeds event with dizzy rapidity; in the ante-room of General Epanchin, the prince confides his deepest and most intimate feelings to the servant. Then comes the scene in Epanchin's own room, with the portrait of Nastasya Filippovna, the General's family, the Ivolgin family, the meeting with Nastasya Filippovna, the Olavs, etc., till the evening, with the arrival of Rogozhin and his band of drunkards and wastrels come to congratulate the lady of the house on her name day, etc. It is superfluous to remark that Myshkin, Rogozhin, and all the rest are not living men, but mere masks. Dostoevsky never described a living man. All the different masks only conceal one real personage, the author himself, who, forgetful of all others, and concentrated solely on himself, goes on with the only business which interests him, his struggle with his old adversary, "twice two is four". "Twice two is four" lies in one of the balances, heavy, inert, immovable, with all its train of traditional, eternal, self-evident truths. Into the other Dostoevsky with trembling, feverish hand throws his imponderables, injustice, terror, joy, triumph, despair, beauty, the future, ugliness, slavery, freedom, and all the rest that Plotinus has summed up in the phrase to timi§ætaton.

It must at once be obvious to every one that "twice two is four" must be much heavier, not only than to timi§ætaton which Dostoevsky threw overboard in the course of a single day, but than all the events in the whole of the world's history. Is "twice two is four" going to be affected by a hair's breadth by the wrongs that Nastasya Filippovna suffers at the hands of Totsky, or by the courage of Rogozhin who, having only seen Nastasya Filippovna once, is not afraid to provoke the fury of his brutal father, or by the fact that Myshkin suffered the blow of Ivolgin's Olav with Christian meekness? Aye, even if Dostoevsky had been able to contain the whole history of the world within the limits of that single day described in the first part of The Idiot, all history, with the acts of the saints, the campaigns of Alexander the Great, the heroism of Regulus and Brutus, the revelations of the Prophets, the inspired words of Plato and Plotinus, with all that there has been of great and beautiful, of terrible and ugly, with its aspirations and hopes, its catastrophes and despairs, the heroism and the crimes of all who

have lived on earth - had he been able to throw all this into that balance, in which he put his to timi§ætaton, he would not have lightened the infinite weight of "twice two is four" by a single grain. Consequently our last hope would have vanished of discovering were it only a trace of that second dimension of time where those things end which only begin here and do not end, where all the caprices rejected by history might find an abiding place, the caprices which no one will recognize and no one protect, but for which Dostoevsky wants to find a guarantee in the teeth of the whole world. And Dostoevsky knows this just as well as Spinoza. More than this, Spinoza himself put the same question with the clarity and intentional stressing of the hopelessness of finding any solution which are characteristic of that remarkable philosopher's whole work.

"Postquam homines sibi persuaserunt, omnia quae fiunt propter ipsos fieri, id in unaquaque re praecipuum judicare debuerunt, quod ipsis utilissimum et illa omnia praestantissima aestimare, a quibus optime afficiebantur. Unde has formare debuerunt notiones, quibus rerum naturas explicarent, scilicet bonum, malum, ordinem, confusionem, calidum, frigidum, pulchritudinem, deformitatem... Veritas humanum genus in aeternum lateret nisi mathesis, quae non circa fines, sed circa figurarum essentias et proprietates versatur, aliam veritatis normam hominibus ostendisset." (Ethics, Part I, Appendix.)

[When men convinced themselves that all that happened, happened for their sakes, they had to hold in each thing the most important part to be that which was most useful to them, and to esteem those things as most valuable which affected them most agreeably. Therefore they had to form those ideas by which they explained the nature of things: good, evil, order, confusion, heat, cold, beauty, ugliness... Truth would eternally be hidden from the human race, had not mathematics, which deals, not with ends, but with the nature and properties of figures, shown to man another norm of truth.]

You will see these two united before the same balances, before the same terrible, thousand-year-old riddle - the modern Russian author, the unlearned man, and the lonely scholar, the philosopher unknown and despised in his own day, although now so famous. It is generally thought that Spinoza stopped short at mathematics, finding in them the answer to the riddle which he asked himself. But if one not only reads Spinoza carefully, but also listens to the tone of his voice, one can hear in the words which I have just quoted, and in the whole of the Appendix which concludes the first part of the Ethics, an echo of the same problem which Dostoevsky pursued with such persistence throughout all his works. Spinoza consciously tramples the good, the beautiful, and all that was ever sacred to man underfoot, as though he were asking, like the prophet: "How many times must we be smitten?"

He has taken everything from us; he has left us nothing but "twice two is four". Will man be able to bear this? Can I bear it myself? Or will my "consciousness", all human consciousness, be finally crushed under this burden? And then we shall not only feel, but see, if only for a moment, that "here" everything is but beginning, and that what begins here does not finish here, where there is as yet neither beauty, nor ugliness, nor good, nor evil, but only hot and cold, agreeable and disagreeable, where it is not liberty that reigns, but necessity, to which even God Himself is subject, where human will and reason are as unlike the will and reason of the Creator as the dog, the barking animal, is unlike the dog-star.

Dostoevsky's nature was two-fold, like Spinoza's, and like that of nearly all those who try to awaken humanity from its torpor. Therefore he was bound at times to shut his second pair of eyes and to look at the world through his ordinary, blind eyes; to resolve his discords into harmonious chords. Even he took shelter, and more than once, under the shadow of those rules and laws against which he had declared war to the death; he fled to the enemy's camp to warm himself a

t their fires. It is the source of constant and painful misunderstanding for the reader. He does not know where to seek the real Dostoevsky. Is he where things both begin and end, or where they only begin, but do not end; where balance is maintained, or where it is upset? Where time has only one dimension, or where one can perceive the second dimension and where the scale which bears the timi§ætaton seems to begin gently to sink...? It is all the harder to determine, because it is impossible to fix exactly the fundamental idea of any one of the novels. Even their subject, though always more or less in accordance with the accepted rules, is so complicated, so full of ramifications, that it is not possible to be sure exactly what the author intended. Secondary episodes constantly interrupt the main course of the novel, and these episodes are of such importance, both in subject and in treatment, that they push the principal theme into the background and completely obscure it. Nevertheless all Dostoevsky's stories show one common characteristic.

His heroes seem to have neither the will nor the capacity to act, to create; destruction and death dog their footsteps everywhere. This is clearly done in order that the reader should not have even the illusion of an ending. Myshkin, whom the author means for a saint, disinterestedness incarnate, is no exception to this general rule; in spite of all his efforts, he not only does not succeed in helping any one, but regularly adds to the forces of evil. A cruel destiny weighs on every one, all are doomed. Spinoza might well have quoted scenes from The Idiot as a proof of the sovereign power of necessity, Luther might have used them to illustrate his De Servo Arbitrio. If Darwin had seen in life what Dostoevsky saw, he would not have talked of the law of the preservation of species, but of its destruction. If the historians and theorists of knowledge had studied with Dostoevsky they would have replaced the law of sufficient reason by that of absolute unreason. Nothing in Dostoevsky's novels is determined by anything else. It is the logic of Tertullian, the logic of dreams which rules in them: non pudet quia pudendum est, prorsus credibile est quia incertum, certum est quia impossibile. I am not ashamed, because it is shameful; it is absolutely credible, because it is absurd; it is certain, because it is impossible.

Prince Myshkin busies himself with other people's affairs because he has no need to do so; Rogozhin kills Nastasya Filippovna just because it is the most senseless thing he could have done; Nastasya Filippovna aspires to sainthood because she knows perfectly well that she will never attain it.

It is the same thing with Dostoevsky's other novels; perpetual crises, perpetual ecstasies. All Dostoevsky's heroes strive after the things that will destroy them. The Brothers Karamazov takes for its motto one of the most enigmatical verses of the Fourth Gospel: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone, but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." It is one of those verses on which Dostoevsky himself comments in The Brothers Karamazov: "It is terrible what one finds in those books" (the Bible). "It is easy enough to thrust them under our noses - but who wrote them? Were they really men?" Yes, who were they who wrote these books? Were they men? And could Dostoevsky, who has made their thoughts his own, remain still a man?

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Conquest of the Self-Evident

<< | >>

10

Dostoevsky realizes very well that there are certain treasures in life which must be guarded as very precious, and that there are certain others which are not worth the trouble of keeping at all, since they can only shackle us and weigh us down. But how can we distinguish the one sort from the other? It is useless to refer to common consciousness, to the theory of knowledge, to ethics. Shall we consult our second sight? But it will teach us nothing. Besides, it rebels when consulted and only appears uncalled, always at some inopportune moment. In The Notes from Underground Dostoevsky tries to dispense with every criterion, every rule, every law; but he is obliged to pay tribute to common consciousness and to preface his work with a note of explanation. In Crime and Punishment the natural vision already influences the idea. In The Idiot one sees even more clearly Dostoevsky's efforts to attract into his own camp those proofs which he formerly repulsed with so much fury. And in proportion as he advances, so the tendency strengthens to try to harmonize the two visions, or rather, to submit the second to the first. This explains the strange fact to which I referred previously: that Dostoevsky's novels abound in secondary episodes, and that it is in just these episodes that the essential significance of the books lies.

Even in The Diary of a Writer the political articles are interspersed from time to time by little tales and stories like "A Gentle Spirit", "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", and "The Lonely One", pages of profound and powerful significance in which the author proclaims in a voice not his own the things seen by the eyes that are not his. In each of these stories, in each episode of the novels, Dostoevsky's every attempt to make the results of his second sight fit into the frame of that experience on which common humanity bases its existence proves wholly vain.

In The Idiot there is an episode in which Dostoevsky's intention is hard to understand, unless it is to give a final blow to the miserable Prince Myshkin, though he totters to a fall at every step he takes. One of the characters of The Idiot is a consumptive young man called Hippolyte, whose days and even whose hours are numbered. Throughout a whole night he reads out his "confessions" to his friends, one of the most moving and terrible confessions ever written since Job's, on which it is undoubtedly modeled. Who could have suggested such burning and prophetic words to the dying man? Who could have suggested them to Dostoevsky, who though old, had as yet no premonition of death?

Incidentally, Dostoevsky, faithful to immemorial tradition, does all he can to conceal himself from the curiosity of the uninitiated. The confession is headed "Apr§Ús moi le deluge". This should surely be more than enough to turn aside common consciousness. But we must remember that at the bottom of his heart Dostoevsky had no faith in anything but his ugly little duckling. He was obviously convinced that ugliness and horror only existed in the world to conceal the last and supreme mystery of creation from those who were not ready for it. Hear what Hippolyte says of the picture that he saw at Rogozhin's house. The picture represented the Descent from the Cross:

"Christ's face was hideously disfigured by the blows He had received; it was swollen and had horrible, bleeding wounds on it; the eyes were wide open, they squinted and shone with the vitreous gleam of death. And strange to say, when one looks at the dead body of this man who has suffered so much, one curious, particular question arises in one's mind: if the body was like this (and so doubtless it was) which the disciples looked upon and the apostles, and the women who had followed Him and waited at the foot of the cross; if all those who believed in Him and loved Him saw Him like this, how could they believe that this martyr could ever rise again? And then another thought presents itself: if death is so frightful, if the laws of nature are so powerful, how can any one triumph over them? How could we overcome them when even He could not overcome them who forced na

ture to obey Him when He was alive, to whom it submitted itself; when He cried 'Talifa cumi' the virgin arose, when He called to Lazarus to come forth from the grave, Lazarus heard Him and obeyed? When one looks at this picture, nature seems to become an enormous, pitiless, silent beast, or rather, more accurately (although strangely), nature becomes more like one of these modern machines which has blindly seized, swallowed, torn to pieces and engulfed that infinitely beloved and admirable Being who alone was worth more than all nature and its laws which, indeed, were perhaps only created to produce that Being."

I do not know if, after all that has been said, further proof is needful that Dostoevsky is here expressing his deepest, most intimate, and also most disturbing thoughts. How many times have we not already discovered him standing before the scales of that terrible balance, forgetful of himself and the whole world! In one scale lies nature, enormous, infinitely weighty with its laws and principles, dumb, blind and deaf. Into the other scale, with trembling hand, Dostoevsky throws his imponderable things, his unsheltered, unprotected timi§ætaton, and waits with beating heart to see which of the two will sink. And he does not entrust this operation to Prince Myshkin, whom every one, including himself, reveres. Dostoevsky knows that Myshkin would suffer a blow and turn the other cheek, but he would shrink from the dreadful balances. Humility is not the virtue which Dostoevsky seeks.

Indeed, he does not seek virtue at all. Virtue has no existence of its own. It only exists through our recognition, all its strength is drawn from our approval. It is own sister to that "twice two is four"; both born of the same mother: the law. But so long as this law exists and holds judgment, Death will be ruler over the world. And who will dare challenge Death to single combat, when all the evidence is on its side, that evidence so cruelly described by Dostoevsky and justified by the theory 'of knowledge and by ethics? Certainly not Prince Myshkin. He is all for ethics; he himself courts the praises of "principle". Even saints cannot live without the praise of the law. St. Jerome taught, and his words were echoed by Liguori, the last Doctor of the Church, when he addressed himself to the nuns who were renouncing the world: "Disce superbiam sanctam", learn sacred pride. "Scito, te illis esse meliorem", know that you are better than others. The monk is not yet ready for the supreme battle, even the most scrupulous and sincere monk. He still puts his trust in his works and expects praise; he can still take pride in praises.

Prince Myshkin, too, will not give up his holy pride, and so will not follow Dostoevsky to the end. The only people able to follow, whose destiny it is to do so, are those who have lost rights and all protection; the underground men. Only they can allow themselves to doubt the legality of the judgments of nature and ethics, or of any judgment; only they may expect at any moment to see the imponderable weigh down the solid weight made up of the self-evident truths and the judgments of reason based on them - of reason, which has thrown into the balance, not only the natural but also the moral laws. Hippolyte has no fear of morality and its sanctions. He despises pride, even holy pride. He does not want to be better than others, he does not want to be good, he spurns the praises of morality.

"What tribunal is judge here?" he asks. "For whose sake must I not only be condemned, but suffer my condemnation without protest? Does it really benefit any one?" And further on: "What is the good of my humility? Is it not possible simply to eat me up without insisting that I should sing the praises of my devourer?" These are the questions that Hippolyte has learnt to ask; Kant did not know how to question thus. It is only a few, rare natures in the history of humanity who are able to ask such questions. In our own day there was Nietzsche, with his Beyond Good and Evil. Before him Luther, who taught that good works do not bring salvation. Luther had heard this from St. Augustine, who in his turn was only developing the ideas of St. Paul, which he again had gathered from Isaiah and fro

m the supreme and terrible Bible story of the Fall.

In reply to Hippolyte's confession, "omnitude", represented by most of the characters in The Idiot, including Prince Myshkin, the saint, breaks into mockery, howls, and cat-calls. Common consciousness flies to the defence of its ideal the law. The saints themselves will not give up the law. Some days after the terrible night on which Hippolyte had appealed in vain to "omnitude", he tries to talk alone to the "saint", whom he hopes to find independent of the law, free from fear or flattery once he is out of sight of his fellows. But it is in vain. Law, quo nos laudabiles vel vituperabiles sumus, is as deeply rooted in the prince's heart as "twice two is four", in this the saint is no different from the ordinary man.

Their conversation ends as follows: Hippolyte asks the prince: "Well, tell me yourself, what ought I to do, according to you. How should I die in order to make a virtuous end? Tell me!" The prince will not give up his holy pride and fears above all things to forfeit his right to the praises of the law. He takes up the challenge. "Go your way and forgive us our happiness", he answers softly. There is no cavil possible: he has passed the test; it is impossible to go any further. Hippolyte can only burst out laughing: "Ha! ha! ha!... That is what I thought! I expected something of that sort! Oh, well, that is just like you, you others, you eloquent people!"

What was Dostoevsky's object in forcing the prince to such a confession? After all it was not Rakitin, not Claude Bernard; it was Myshkin, whom the author intentionally made a positive type. But the "second sight" saw things differently.

It is obvious that at this moment Dostoevsky saw another and even more difficult problem rise up before him; one even harder than that which he discussed in Raskolnikov's case. Raskolnikov reasoned thus: There are men who allow themselves to shed the blood of their fellows. Napoleon for example, who was much admired by the generality of men. Consequently, one can shed blood and kill the body of one's neighbour with the authorization and approval of the law. Myshkin in his humility goes further ("humility is a strength" as Dostoevsky has said). He considers that as a reward for his obedience he has more rights conceded to him by law, and more strength than Napoleon; he has the right and the strength to kill, not the body but the soul. "Forgive us our happiness, and go your way." And then? What will happen if Hippolyte goes on his way and forgives them their happiness? Nothing will happen, and nothing must happen. The ideal equilibrium will be re-established. Our reason demands nothing further.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Conquest of the Self-Evident

<< | >>

11

We have seen that Dostoevsky made increasingly strong efforts to fit his ecstatic visions into the limits of everyday experience, to transform "caprice" and that individual, internal impulse peculiar to himself of which he has told us so many new things, into the "necessary and the universal." It was too difficult to him to enter the second dimension of time whither the whole timi§ætaton had vani

shed; he wanted to receive his reward here, in history, in the first dimension of time; to achieve a guarantee, a sanction for "caprice". His first eyes, his natural eyes, and his reason, born at the same time as these eyes, constantly assured him that time had only one dimension, and that nothing could exist in the world without the guarantee and sanction of the law. His second sight told him that "man loves suffering"; but reason sees a "contradiction" here. Suffering must "give us something" if we are to love it. And Dostoevsky, who had felt the shamelessness of "twice two is four", had not the courage this time to attack the law of contradiction. Suffering "buys" something, and this something possesses a certain value for all of us, for common consciousness; by suffering we buy the right to judge. And Dostoevsky even believes that this judgment was the last, the terrible last judgment of which Holy Scriptures speak, and that he had the right to judge. And this supreme right, the right to speak as a potentate, sometimes inspires him so strongly that many people have imagined, as he imagined himself, that to judge was his real function and destiny.

Whom does he not judge? In The Possessed it is Granovsky, Turgenev, and the younger generation; in The Diary of a Writer Stasiulevitch and Granovsky; in the speech in honour of Pushkin, the whole of Russian society. In The Brothers Karamazov he sits in judgment once more. He judges boldly, pitilessly, finally. But strange though it may seem, the more he judged, and the more he realized that men feared and acknowledged his right to judge, the more his innermost soul questioned man's right to judgment of any kind. More than this; he comes to consider this supreme, sovereign right not so much as a right but as a privilegium odiosum, as a shameful, intolerable, and painful burden.

This is, in fact, the sole theme of the numerous secondary incidents with which his novels abound. We have spoken of Hippolyte's confession, and of his last conversation with Prince Myshkin. We shall find an analogous episode in The Possessed.

The real hero of The Possessed is not Verkhovensky, nor Stavrogin, but the great, the enigmatic and silent "Stylite" Kirilov. This stammering man, whose words seem to be torn from his mouth, who does nothing and desires to do nothing, is the real spirit of the book. The episode of Kirilov may perhaps be counted among the greatest masterpieces in all literature, owing to the force with which it expresses what we call the "inexpressible". Kirilov proclaims his own free will. The essence of all the doctrine of the Stylites and Ascetics has ever lain, since earliest times, in precisely this proclamation of free will; in calling halt amid a crowd of raging men - for in a cave only the dead do not rage - and in asking at last whether this world of ours to which reason has dictated its laws and which collective experience has built up, is really the only possible world, and whether reason and her laws are really all-powerful? Dostoevsky has only made one mistake; he should not have allowed Kirilov to commit suicide. Stylites and Ascetics have no need to commit suicide. They have other means of proclaiming their liberty. But it seems that this mistake was intentional, that Dostoevsky consciously made Kirilov behave in a way that he could not have done. If Dostoevsky had not invented that ending, he would have been obliged to add a note like that with which he prefaced The Notes from Underground.

Nor must we overlook the short story, "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", which did not appear as an episode in one of Dostoevsky's novels, but found a place in his Diary of a Writer. The story is almost unknown, like that Other, "A Gentle Spirit", with which it is directly connected and which also appears in The Diary of a Writer. One senses in these two stories the same inspiration, the same fire which dictated The Notes from Underground, Hippolyte's confession and the many other masterpieces which stud Dostoevsky's literary crown like so many jewels. "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man", is the continuation of "A Gentle Spirit", which had appeared six months earlier. Dostoevsky thought it necessary to justify the latter by a prefatory note, as he had done with The Notes from Underground. I

t does, in fact, need justification, but not for the reasons adduced by Dostoevsky. This is the subject of the story: The hero is a retired officer who, like all Dostoevsky's real heroes, has been cruelly and unjustly treated. He was not afflicted like Prince Myshkin, who was an epileptic, but in such a way that he had only one idea in his head, one object in life, which was to run a pawnbroker's business. Then he meets a young girl, the first human being whom he has ever loved with his whole heart; they marry. She is gentleness itself. He loves her so much that he is willing to initiate her into his idea. He prepares to reveal it to her, but he delays a single day, an hour; he has not done testing the young woman and himself. But on that very day, driven to despair, she throws herself out of the window, holding an icon in her hand, and kills herself. It is well conceived; a man of that sort would not flinch before any question. Listen to his words, as Dostoevsky repeats them:

"What do I care for your laws now? What is the good of your customs, your beliefs? Let your judge judge me, let me be brought before your tribunal - I shall maintain that I do not recognize their authority. The judge will cry, 'Silence, officer!' and I shall say, 'Who gave you a power such that I should obey it?' How has some obscure fate managed to destroy all that was dearest to me! I separate myself from you all. Everything is the same to me!... Fate! Nature! The trouble is that men are alone on earth! 'Is there any one alive on this plain?' as the hero in the legend calls out. I too ask the question, though I am no hero, but there is none to answer... All are dead, and there are none but the dead all round me. Only men, and around them - silence."

The story ends with that question. The "judge," has no power at his command sufficient to compel the retired officer, the pawnbroker, to obey him. "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" shows us the psychology of the man to whom everything is indifferent. One would think that there was nothing interesting in this, that a man to whom everything is indifferent has no psychology. But how does it come about that to "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" Dostoevsky appends the subtitle, "A Fantastic Story" ? The very essence of the fantastic is that it consists of unexpected metamorphoses, where before our very eyes "nothing" will be miraculously transformed into to timi§ætaton. Thus Plotinus discerned God where others could see only the void. So with Dostoevsky. He demanded a guarantee for caprice, he sought to discover the second dimension of time, just because by so doing he would legitimatize the fantastic and put it in the place that had been occupied in common consciousness by natural events.

The story begins thus: "I am a ridiculous man. Now they call me a madman. That would be a promotion, if I did not go on looking to them as comical as before." You see that in 1877, fifteen years after the publication of The Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky is still telling us the uncompleted story of a man who has been rejected by common consciousness. In the eyes of every one else, this ridiculous, despicable man is an ugly duckling who had better never have been born, or once born should have hidden himself in the deepest depths, not only from others but also from himself; for he, too, is possessed by common consciousness, and it judges him and condemns his ugliness. The ridiculous man knows it himself; he is intolerable both to himself and to other people. And yet suddenly, one knows not how or whence, a strange indifference is born in him. Dostoevsky, as we know, is especially interested in anything that comes he knows not whence, and is therefore all attention. What is this indifference? What does it mean? -

"From year to year I became, indeed, increasingly aware of this frightful peculiarity" (that I appeared ridiculous), "but somehow or other, I became more calm about it. Why? I have not yet succeeded in explaining it to myself. Perhaps because I was gradually coming to recognize with terror a thing of infinitely greater moment than my own absurdity. I was, in fact, acquiring the conviction that everything was the same to me. I had long had a presentiment of it, but last year it suddenly came to a climax. I realized suddenly that it would be the same t

o me whether the world went on existing or not. I heard, I felt in the depths of my being that now, while I live, there is nothing. At first it still seemed to me that a great many things had been accomplished before my time, but later I guessed that there had been nothing then either, that everything had been an illusion. And little by little I became convinced that there never would be anything."

Let us stop and ask ourselves what is the meaning of this strange "suddenly" which leads us to statements even more fantastic: "everything is the same; nothing happens; nothing has ever happened; nothing will ever happen. These are statements which Dostoevsky persists in making, which he derives from some source of which we are unconscious. Have we not the right, are we not actually obliged to say to Dostoevsky, as Aristotle replied to Heraclitus when he denied the principle of contradiction, "One can say these things, but one must not think them"? If the ridiculous man is not stopped, not only the law of contradiction, the most immutable of all principles, will fall to pieces, but every principle in existence, the whole of "omnitude". And this through the caprice of a single man - and what a man! A being for whom, on his own showing, madness would be a promotion. One must admit this openly, but one must also admit that if the ridiculous man is silenced, then Dostoevsky himself is silenced too. And not only Dostoevsky, but Plato with his cave, Plotinus with his One, Euripides who does not know what life is and what death. Does this tempt you? Would you like to be left alone with Aristotle the metrios eis hyperbol§Ün (moderate to excess)? One cannot argue on this point. One can only ask the question and pass on.

Behold, then, this ridiculous man to whom all things are the same, around whom there is nothing, who is convinced that nothing ever has been or ever will be; this man makes a great resolution, he determines to commit suicide. You may, if you like, laugh at Dostoevsky, especially as there is an argument to hand that was invented twenty-five centuries ago; if nothing exists, if nothing ever has existed, the ridiculous man does not exist either, nor his decision, nor all the "suddenly", nor this story, etc. You can of course say all this, and Dostoevsky knows that you could laugh at him and refuse even to regard him as a madman, thinking the title too good for him. But he goes on with the story, piling up his absurdities and contradictions; it would almost be worth repeating them all, if only space would permit.

Those who wish to get close to Dostoevsky will have to make a whole series of special exercitia spiritualia; to live for hours, days, years, in the midst of mutually contradictory self-evidences. There is no other way. Only thus can one perceive that time has not one, but two or even more dimensions, that laws have not existed for all time, but are "given" and only in order that the offense might abound, that it is faith and not works which can save souls, that the death of Socrates can shake the formidable "twice two is four," that God demands always and only the impossible, that the ugly duckling can change into the beautiful white swan, that everything has a beginning here but nothing ends, that caprice has a right to guarantees, that the fantastic is more real than the natural, that life is death and death is life, and other truths of the same sort which look out at us with strange and terrible eyes from every page of Dostoevsky's writing.

If you want to know how far the thought of the ridiculous man will adventure in quest of his "new" truth, to conquer it and lose it in the moment that he seizes it, then re-read this short and almost forgotten but truly remarkable story. The most extraordinary thing is that this truth is not in any way new; it is the oldest of truths, almost as old as the world, for it was revealed to man almost on the day of creation. It was revealed, written in the Book of Books and forgotten immediately after. You will have guessed that I have in mind the story of the Fall.

The ridiculous man, to whom everything was indifferent, having made up his mind to die, went to sleep and in his dream saw what the Bible tells us. He dreamt that he was among men who had not yet tasted the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, who did not yet know shame, who possessed no knowledge, and had neither the power nor the wish to judge.

"The children of the sun, the children of their own sun! Oh, how beautiful they were! I had never seen anything so beautiful on our earth... It seemed to me incomprehensible that knowing so many things, they should not possess our knowledge. But I soon realized that their consciousness was nurtured and completed otherwise than ours. They did not aspire to cognition of life, as we do, for their life was complete. But their knowledge surpassed our science in depth and in height because our science tries to explain what life is, tries to know itself, in order to teach others to live, while they knew without science. I understood this, though I could not understand their knowledge. They showed me their trees... and I could not understand the intense love with which they regarded them... and you know, I think I am not deceiving myself when I tell you that they spoke to them. Yes, they had grasped their language, and I am convinced that the trees understood."

No modern theory of knowledge puts the problem of the essence and the significance of scientific knowledge so clearly and so deeply. It was only in antiquity that Plato and Plotinus, those visionaries, understood and, in so far as it is given to men to do so, solved the problem which Dostoevsky has put: to renounce scientific knowledge in order to see the truth as it is. Truth and scientific knowledge cannot be reconciled. Truth will not endure the bonds of scientific knowledge; it is suffocated in the arms of those formidable proofs which furnish our science with certainties. Science, the ridiculous man goes on, "reveals laws" and puts "the law of happiness above happiness", science wants to "teach us to live". But truth is above laws and laws are for truth what the prison walls and the fetters were in Dostoevsky's existence. Dostoevsky himself was struck, blinded by his strange vision; he did not know whether he ought to accept it; was it a dream or a reality? was it an hallucination or was it a revelation?

"But why should I not suppose that it was thus?" he asks. "It was perhaps a thousand times more beautiful than I have described it. It may have been a dream, and yet it is impossible that it should not have happened. I will tell you a secret; perhaps all this was not really a dream, for something happened, something so hideously real that it could not have happened in a dream. I admit that my dream might have been born of my heart, but my heart alone could not have been the cause of the awful thing that happened. How could I have invented it or dreamed it? Could my miserable heart or my capricious brain have risen to the height of this revelation? Judge for yourselves. Till now I have hidden the truth, but today I will confess it: I corrupted them all..."

By what means did this earthly man corrupt the inhabitants of paradise? He endowed them with our knowledge or, in the language of the Scriptures, he incited them to taste of the fruit of the forbidden tree. And when they had acquired our knowledge, they saw themselves assailed by all the plagues of earth, and death drew near to them. "They knew shame, and raised shame to the rank of a virtue," continues Dostoevsky, commenting and developing the short Bible legend. This knowledge was not enough; the same root put forth ethics; the world was changed, ringed round with law; men, from free creatures, became automata. Few are they who, for short and rare moments, painfully aspire to true existence and are suddenly aware that the force which possesses them, which directs them and which they have worshipped, is eternal sleep, death, annihilation. This is simply Plato's "anamnesis", Plotinus's "awakening". This is what is given to us in mercy, but cannot be won by our own strength, by our virtues or our good works.

The reader can see that Dostoevsky did not invent this truth himself; he could n

ot have invented it. He speaks of the "revelation" of truth, because truth was revealed to him. It is that truth which, although known to every one, although recorded in the one book which has been read more often than any other, yet remains eternally hidden. But the most extraordinary part, more extraordinary than anything that Dostoevsky has yet told us, is the end of "The Dream Of a Ridiculous Man". The hero of the story gives up his plan of suicide when the truth is revealed to him:

"for now I want to live, to live! I raised my arms and invoked eternal truth; no, I did not invoke it, I wept. Delight, overwhelming delight, flooded my whole being. Yes, to live and to teach! I resolved in that moment to spread this teaching, to give my life to it. I want to teach; I want to teach; but what? The truth, for I have seen it with my own eyes, in all its glory."

To teach the truth - I am going to teach the truth! In other words, I will make a gift of it to common consciousness, which, before accepting it, will without doubt insist that it should first submit to the laws. You understand what that means? For the second time that "frightful" thing of which he has told us happened to Dostoevsky, not in sleep, but waking. He had betrayed the eternal truth revealed to him, and sold it to its mortal enemy. He told us that in a dream he had corrupted the spotless inhabitants of paradise. Now he hurried towards men, to repeat, in full possession of his faculties, the same crime at which he had so shuddered in his dream.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Conquest of the Self-Evident

<< | >>

12

We are now facing the greatest mystery which has ever confronted man, the mystery of the Fall. The reader will no doubt agree that none of Dostoevsky's internal struggles, none of his efforts, had any other aim or object than to understand this mystery, or at least to participate in it. For we cannot grasp it or master it any more than we can understand the truth. It is of the very essence of mystery that it cannot be unveiled, and truth can only be glimpsed when we do not try to take possession of it, or to use it for our historical needs, within the limits, that is, of the single dimension of time which is known to us. As soon as we try to unveil the mystery or make use of the truth, to show the mystery to every one and make truth universal and necessary, then, even though we are guided by the most noble and exalted desire, that of sharing our knowledge with our neighbour, of extending its benefits to the whole of humanity - yet we shall immediately forget all that we saw when we were "beside ourselves" with ecstasy. We shall begin to see as the world sees and to speak as the world demands. This logic, which miraculously transforms individual "useless" impressions into an experience of general utility and thus creates that solid, immutable order so necessary to our existence - this logic, (also called reason) kills mystery and truth. Collecting his prodigious powers for the last time, Dostoevsky composed The Brothers Karamazov on this theme.

As we have seen, he chooses a verse from the Fourth Gospel as motto; but he might equally well have quoted his own words in The Notes from Underground.

"So, long live the underworld! I did indeed say that I envy the normal man with the last drop of my bile; but when I see him as he is, I have no wish to be in his place (though all the while I shall go on envying him). No, no! When all is said and done, underground is better! There one can at least . Ah! but I am lying again. I am lying because I know quite clearly myself, as well as I know that 'twice two is four', that it is not underground that is worth so much, but some quite different place which I ardently desire, but shall never find. To the devil with underground!"

Long live the underworld! To the devil with the underworld! This brutal, violent inconsistency shows itself throughout the novel, every line of which bears witness to a consuming thirst for something, an unappeased torment which the author does not succeed in defining. If the corn of wheat does not die it will remain single, if it perishes it will bear fruit. How die? Withdraw for ever underground? It is beyond human power. Join with normal men and become a normal man oneself? Those who have been visited by the Angel of Death are incapable of doing this. That is why The Brothers Karamazov contains so many terrible questions and (but perhaps this is premeditated) so many answers which are clearly meant to be only ostensible. There is one point, however, on which Dostoevsky never contradicts himself; the - generally admitted answers, the common-sense and scientific answers, are always unacceptable to him.

But before passing on to The Brothers Karamazov, I shall allow myself a short digression which will help us, if not to find our way, at least to recognize the labyrinth into which Dostoevsky has introduced us.

Every one knows the famous German historian of Christianity, Professor Adolph Harnack. Let us hear his testimony; his studies gave him occasion to examine, to examine slowly and at length, the "mysteries" among which Dostoevsky spent his life. But Harnack, unlike Dostoevsky, had only one pair of eyes at his disposal. Further, as a historian, he was convinced that man has only one kind of sight, since time has only one dimension. Harnack loses no opportunity of telling us that the law of contradiction is the fundamental principle of our reason and that no one can defy with impunity the laws of reason and the science based on these laws. This learned historian writes as follows (Dogmengeschichte, III, 81):

"There has never been any religious faith, no matter how strong, which has not leant in the supreme, decisive moment on exterior authority. It is only the pale dissertations of philosophers or the polemics of Protestant theologians that have constructed a faith which draws its strength exclusively from internal sources. These, it is certain, are the force of its existence and development; but for this faith to act, must there not be special conditions? Jesus Christ invoked the authority of the Old Testament; the early Christians the Prophecies; Augustine the Church, and even Luther appealed to Scripture. Life and history show us that no faith can be active and fruitful, if it does not invoke some external authority, and does not possess full assurance of its absolute authority." Thus speaks Professor Harnack, and he adds at the bottom of the page, as a note, "I state the facts, but I despair of explaining the reason for them."

Here is testimony of capital importance - if one considers who gives it - and one may not pass over it regardless. One must, indeed, before utilizing it, subject it to some critical examination.

"There has never been any faith..." Never? How does Professor Harnack know this? History, which he has undoubtedly studied with quite exceptional profundity, has certainly retained no record of any religious faith which has not leaned on outside authority. But does history keep a record of all the cases and all the facts, or even of the majority? Is it history's duty at all to preserve facts? Of the infinite number of different facts, history only extracts a certain number, and even these are already commented and "interpreted", adapted, that is to say,

to certain ends. But Harnack expressly says, "Never." It is obvious that he has drawn this conclusion, not from history or from a study of the facts, for he could not study, or even glance at, all the facts that have ever occurred It is obvious that this "never" comes from some other source. It is to reason, the principle of science, which, according to him, cannot be renounced with impunity, that he has gone for the authority to transform his own testimony into a universal and necessary judgment.

This is all very well, if you are really so afraid of chastisement that you cannot give up the directions of reason and science even for the sake of the truth; or if you are so credulous and so inexperienced that you really believe that submission to science and reason will guarantee you against all punishment. But Dostoevsky, as we have seen, does not fear punishment; he has told us that it can happen for a man to prefer suffering to well-being. We have also heard from Dostoevsky that the humblest submission will not protect us against punishment; and Spinoza also teaches us, "Experientia in dies reclamat, at infinitis exemplis ostendit, commoda atque incommoda piis aeque ac impiis promiscue evenire." (Daily experience requires, nay, shows by an infinitude of examples that good and evil fall on the just and the unjust alike.) Both obedient and disobedient, pious and impious will all be condemned, sooner or later at the Last Judgment: no one will be acquitted, no one will escape punishment.

Thus Professor Harnack has gone beyond the limits of simple testimony, and of the record of what he has seen and heard, and has imparted his own theory of reason and its rights. One might even ask whether it is right to say "even Luther". "Jesus, the early Christians, Augustine, and 'even' Luther." It seems to me that it would have been better to have omitted that "even".

But these corrections once made, we can accept Professor Harnack's testimony in its entirety. Now, however, it acquires rather a different significance. Harnack cannot say, "there has never been a religious faith..." What has, and what has not been, is as unknown to the historian as to the simple pilgrim. Of what has been, the historian only knows as much as has been absorbed into the stream of time, and so has traces in the world which are visible to every one; that is, any one can see them, once they are discovered. But as to what has happened without leaving any trace behind, the historian knows nothing and wants to know nothing; and still less does he want to know about things which have happened, but cannot be shown to every one.

Thus, if there ever has been a faith which did not lean on outside authority and did not, in fact, invoke any authority at all, yet if it left no traces, then it is 'to the historian as though it had never existed. The historian only seeks and records "effective" facts. If Harnack had wished to confine himself to a simple record and not to speak in his own name (for the verdict of reason is well enough known already, without him), he should have said that there has never been, not a firm faith, but one capable and desirous of acting, which has not relied on some sort of outside authority; just as no one among the learned authorities, the historians, botanists, and geologists, has ever merely stated facts, but has always referred them to the authority of reason. Even Jesus, to obtain a hearing, had to invoke Scripture; far more the early Christians and Luther. If Harnack had stated his facts like this, they would have acquired quite another significance. It would then suddenly have appeared - quite unexpectedly - that men never would or could have accepted the faith of Jesus or even of Luther, that "faith" cannot be preached at all, that faith cannot act; cannot, that is, determine historical events; that what man or common consciousness calls a "firm faith" does not in any way resemble the faith of Jesus or even Luther, but is merely a collection of rules and principles, which every one obeys and reveres because no one knows whence they come; and because, in fact, men do not want "faith" at all, but only authority and order, which always gains in influence in proportion to the mystery of its origin. In exactly the same way men believe in reason an

d science, and even believe that retribution will only overtake those among them who despise reason and science, but not those who do not.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Conquest of the Self-Evident

<< | >>

13

Dostoevsky was no historian, he was not bound to believe that what begins here must also end here. We must remember that he tried to realize that which was dearest to him, to timi§ætaton, his caprice, in the second dimension of time, beyond the limits of history. Then he hoped that the wall would cease to be a wall, that "twice two is four" would lose its crude self-assurance, that atoms would no longer be protected, that Socrates and Giordano Bruno, the outlaws, would be chiefly cherished, etc. But at the same time, Dostoevsky, like all of us, was a son of earth; he therefore aspired, and sometimes was absolutely forced, not only to contemplate but to act. We have noticed this contradiction in all his works; it is particularly obvious in The Brothers Karamazov and The Diary of a Writer.

In The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky still holds by his experience; not that universal experience of which Kant spoke, an experience founded on self-evidence, but his personal, subjective experience which aims at transcending all proof. But in this novel, just as in the articles of The Diary of a Writer, the author, as though desirous of realizing Harnack's program, wants to obtain the approval of competent authority at any cost. He knows that his faith cannot "act" and will leave no trace in history, unless he can find an outside authority powerful enough to appear unassailable to other men.

Who is the hero of The Brothers Karamazov? If one goes by the preface, it is Alyosha, the youngest of the brothers, and also Father Zossima. But then why are the pages dedicated to them the palest and weakest of the whole novel? Only once does Dostoevsky feel really inspired when speaking of Alyosha, and allow him one of those visions to which he attained in moments of supreme exaltation.

"He" (Alyosha) "turned round abruptly and went out of the cell" (of Father Zossima, who had just died). "He descended the short flight of steps without pausing. His soul was glowing in ecstasy and thirsted for space and liberty. Above him stretched the dome of heaven, beyond reach of age, strewn with a thousand glittering stars. The Milky Way, only faintly apparent as yet, shimmered from the zenith to the horizon; the luminous and still night held the earth in its embrace. Against the sapphire blue of heaven rose the white towers and gilded cupolas of the cathedral. In the flower beds round the house the splendid flowers of autumn had sunk to sleep till morning. The silence of earth mingled with the silence of the sky; the mystery of earth mingled with the mystery of the stars. Alyosha stoOd there and gazed; then suddenly he fell to earth as though struck down. He embraced the earth with both arms, he knew not why, nor whence came this irresistible desire to embrace it all; but he embraced it weeping, he watered it with his tears, and swore in his ecstasy to love it, to love it to the end of his days. Why did he weep? He wept with delight even in the stars which shone in the void, and was not ashamed of his ecstasy. It was as though the invisible threads which bound together all God's infinitely numerous worlds were suddenly joined together in his soul, and it trembled at the touch of those unknown worlds."

In the whole of Dostoevsky you will never find anything like this again. It is true that Father Zossima treats the same subject in one passage, but with less simplicity, less strength, less inspiration. But that was all that Dostoevsky could make up his mind to assign to his official heroes. He himself, moreover, only speaks once in this tone, as though he felt that it was unlawful to speak much of these things; or else he felt that they can only be glimpsed from the bottom of the abyss, of the underworld, and simultaneously with, and as a foil to, those "underground" truths. Both suppositions seem equally admissible. The faith which Harnack would not acknowledge as possible, the faith which invokes no outside authority, which history refuses to acknowledge, and which has left no traces behind, is precisely such a vision of unknown worlds; such a faith takes no account of works and has given nothing to humanity, so that science declares that it cannot exist. But for Dostoevsky this was precisely to timi§ætaton, the eternal caprice for which he claimed and sought guarantees and rights, which he tried with unparalleled audacity to wrest from the power of authority, and even of history and its proofs. From this point of view, as I have said, The Brothers Karamazov forms the sequel to The Notes from Underground, in which chapters such as "The Revolt," "The Odour of Death," and "The Brothers become Acquainted," might have been incorporated entire.

Dimitri Karamazov, the drunkard, the profligate, who is also one of the most ignorant of men, makes a speech of which Plato or Plotinus need not have been ashamed. He quotes Schiller and when the poet says: "Yea, and in all Ceres' wanderings she found misery everywhere, and her great spirit wept for man's fate", he weeps. "Dear friends," he says to his brothers, "this humiliation persists, it persists to this day. Man has much to suffer on this earth. What horrible suffering!... I hardly think of anything but that, brother, of the humiliation of man." And a few minutes later this same ignorant officer declares: "Beauty is a fearful and terrible thing. Terrible, because one cannot define it, and it cannot be defined, because God speaks to us only in riddles. Opposites mingle here, all the most contradictory things live side by side. I have little education, brother, but I think about that a great deal."

He thinks a great deal about it! Can a man of no education think a great deal! And have we any right to call what passed through Dimitri Karamazov's brain thought? It may be indignation, revolt, a hunt for contradictions, for undefinables, but not thought. We may remember that according to Spinoza, the father of modern philosophy, if we want to think we must discard any idea of Bonum et Malum, Pulchritudo et Deformatio. This same Spinoza "taught" us: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere. And if men have learnt anything from Spinoza, it is to discard both the good and the beautiful for understanding's sake and to transform themselves into this "common consciousness" which neither laughs, nor weeps, nor is wroth, but only weighs, measures, and counts, like that mathematics after whose image common consciousness was created.

As for those phrases "opposites mingle here", "all the most contradictory things live side by side," they are more like the ravings of delirium, or a collection of meaningless words. "That which contains an absolute contradiction cannot be true, and any one is entitled to call such a contradiction by its name." Harnack says this of Athanasius (Dogmengeschichte, II, 225); and he would have repeated it of Dostoevsky if he had read him. He would have received ignorant Dimitri Karamazov's "indefinable" with the same indignation.

These are, in fact, all efforts directed towards the sole purpose of confounding the bebai§ætat§Ü t§æv arch§æv the law of contradiction which since the days of Aristotleas been looked upon as the very foundation of thought. But this does not stop Dostoevsky, nor does it frighten him; he remembers that indocti rapiunt caelum; he remembers that "twice two is four" is the principle of death which men gathered from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Is it possible to escape from the curse of knowledge? Can man cease to judge and to condemn? Can he cease to be ashamed of his nakedness, ashamed of himself, or of his surroundings, like Adam and Eve before the serpent led them into temptation. This is the subject of the great discussion which takes place in the "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" (The Brothers Karamazov) between the Cardinal Inquisitor, an old man of ninety in whom all human wisdom is incarnate, and God Himself. The old man has long been silent, ninety years long; but at last he can bear it no longer; he must speak.

He says to God: What have You offered to man? What can You offer him? Liberty? Man cannot accept it. Man wants laws, a settled order, fixed once and for all, which will help him to distinguish the true from the false, the permissible from the prohibited. "Have you the right to betray even a single one of the mysteries of that world from which you descend?" the Cardinal asks God; and he answers himself, since God is silent (God is always silent): "No, You have no right. You have given your work over to us. You have promised and sealed the promise with Your word, You have given us the right to bind and to loose, and You cannot, of course, dream of taking this right away from us."

The Cardinal is, of course, thinking of St. Matthew (xvi, 19): Et tibi dabo claves regni caelorum. Et quodcumque ligaveris super terram erit ligatum et in caelis, et quodcumque solveris super terram erit solutum in caelis. (I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be hound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.) It is on these words that the Catholic Church bases its idea of the "potestas clavium" and of the infallibility of the Church. One knows that many contemporary historians of Christianity, Harnack among them, if I am not mistaken, look upon this verse as a later interpolation. Even if this supposition were correct, if the Church had no verse of Scripture on which to found its pretensions, this would not weaken its rights in the least. In other words, the idea of infallibility needs no heavenly sanctions, and does very well without. Was Harnack thinking of the Bible when he asserted that no one can slight the claims of science and reason with impunity? Socrates, and Plato after him, had already proved in antiquity that men on earth know quite well how to "bind and loose", i.e. to judge; and they knew that in heaven things will be judged as they are on earth. Nobody questions it today. Our theories of knowledge make all appeal to revelation quite superfluous. Edmund Husserl, the most remarkable of contemporary philosophers, has formulated the thought thus: "No idea in modern times is, perhaps, more powerful, more active and more triumphant than that of science. Nothing will put a stop to its victorious advance. It is, in fact, all-embracing in its legitimate aims. Conceived in its ideal perfection, it would be identical with reason itself which can have no authority beside or above its own.

The idea of the "infallibility" of the Church and of the potestas clavium consists precisely in what philosophers have called and still call "reason", this reason which admits of no authority beside its own, and therefore demands that we should fall down and worship it. Dostoevsky perceives this with the peculiar, extraordinary penetration which he manifests whenever "Apollo calls to the sacrifice", and 'obliges him to make use of his second sight. "When a man feels himself free," says the Cardinal, "he has no preoccupation more incessant or more painful, than to find an object to worship. But he aspires to kneel before something which is already beyond dispute, so much so that all men would immediately agree to pay homage. For the desire of these miserable creatures is to discover an object which not only I or any other could adore, but one in which a/i could believe and which all would adore, together. It is this need of common worship which has been the torment of each man individually, and of humanity as a whole, throughout the ages.

It is impossible to go on quoting; we should have to write out the whole "L

egend". But I must once more call the reader's attention to the extraordinary power, akin to clairvoyance, of Dostoevsky's sight, to the keenness with which he puts the most difficult philosophical problems. Such a piercing and deep vision is not to be found neither in the manuals of philosophy, nor even in the best treatises. The theory of knowledge, ethics, and ontology appear quite differently to a man who has received his "initiation" from Dostoevsky, and wants, like him, to participate in the formidable mystery of original sin, whence the torments indicated by the Cardinal are derived. And such a man, I think, would also be capable of understanding Dostoevsky's adversaries in some measure - Spinoza, who hides his incessant doubts deep beneath his mathematical formulae, or Edmund Husserl, who is apparently so careless and triumphant. For Spinoza is simply Dostoevsky's Cardinal, who at the age of thirty-five has already apprehended the terrible secret of which in the "Legend" an old man of ninety whispers from the depths of his underground prison to an eternally silent God. What aspiring thirst for liberty was in Spinoza! But with what implacable rigour he proclaimed this necessity, the only law to which God and man were alike subject!

And he is not alone; nearly all those who have thirsted most painfully after liberty, skeptics and believers alike, sing the praises of necessity with a sort of funereal delight. Luther's best work, De Servo Arbitrio, is directed against Erasmus of Rotterdam, who tried to safeguard some portion of human liberty, were it never so small. Plotinus represented our existence as a marionette show, a performance in which the actors mechanically rendered parts which had been written in advance. Marcus Aurelius said the same thing. To Gogol, as we remember, the earth was an enchanted kingdom, to Plato a cave. The old tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and Shakespeare, the greatest of modern poets, had the same vision of our existence. One cannot say that man is not free; but that man fears liberty above all things, and that it is for this reason that he seeks knowledge, and aspires to find some incontestable and infallible authority at whose feet all men could prostrate themselves together. Liberty is that caprice of which the underground man has spoken to us; but here, on earth, caprice also demands its guarantees, not even suspecting that its supreme prerogative is precisely the ability to do without all guarantees. Man creates what he calls "truth", an illusion of something which has power over both heaven and earth.

"See", the Cardinal goes on, "what you did next, and have always done in the name of liberty. I tell you that man has no more tormenting preoccupation than to find someone to whom at the soonest possible moment he can hand over this gift of liberty which is the wretched creature's birthright. But... instead of taking possession of man's liberty, you have only extended it. Instead of giving humanity solid principles, to appease its conscience once and for all, you have collected everything extraordinary and problematic, everything which is beyond human power."

In other words, philosophy, scientific or apparently scientific philosophy, has hitherto considered itself obliged to "justify" itself before "omnitude", or, in the words of the schoolmen, before "consciousness as such". It seeks solid foundations, what is definite, beyond argument, firm ground, and dreads beyond all things liberty, caprice, everything extraordinary, problematical, and indeterminate in life, never suspecting that it is just this extraordinary, problematical, and undefined something which, having no need of either protection or guarantee, is the true and only object of its study, that n1Lucbrarov of which Plotinus spoke and to which he aspired, the reality which Plato perceived from the depths of his cave, the God which Spinoza hides beneath his mathematical formulae and which inspired the ugly little duckling, Dostoevsky's underground man, when he clenched his fist and put out his tongue so shamelessly at the glass palace which men had erected. The wise men of old have affirmed it: one cannot say of God that He is, for when one says "God is" one immediately loses Him.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Conquest of the Self-Evident

<< | >>

14

We must conclude this study: not that I have exhausted my subject, for Dostoevsky's works are inexhaustible. There are few who have so laid bare their whole souls to the ultimate mysteries of human existence. But before ending, I should like to say a few words about the journalist, as he appears to us in The Diary of a Writer.

We may remember that Dostoevsky concludes his fantastic story, "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man," with an appeal to preaching. It suddenly appeared to him that he was called upon not only to contemplate, but also to act; that action was the sole worthy crown of contemplation. He forgot the terrible thing which he had himself told us, how he had already tried to teach and how this teaching had corrupted the beings who were so pure that they did not know what shame was. He forgot also the Biblical threat that he who has tasted of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil shall die. Perhaps he did not forget it in the exact sense of the word, just as he did not forget the other truths which his second sight had showed him; he forgot only one thing, that those truths were "useless" by their very nature, and that any attempt to make them useful, good for all men at all times, universal and necessary, will immediately turn them from truths into lies.

"There" he had glimpsed the absolute liberty of which his Grand Inquisitor speaks. But what to do with this liberty among men who are more afraid of it than of anything else, who need only something to adore, in whose eyes unshakable authority is preferable to anything in the world, even life? He who wishes to propagate his ideas, and teach in this world with any success, must replace liberty by authority, just as Catholicism has done, according to Dostoevsky, or Luther, according to Harnack.

The Diary of a Writer is not even Dostoevsky's diary; that is, it never, or hardly ever (for all the same it does contain "A Gentle Soul," "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man," and some other similar pages), reflects Dostoevsky's most intimate thoughts and feelings. It is a series of articles in which a man teaches other men how to live and what to do. We have already seen that Dostoevsky sometimes tried, even in his novels, to play this part. We discovered this teaching in Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Possessed. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's last novel, this tendency is particularly marked. The author tries there to present the ideal type of the Master under the figure of Father Zossima. But we have only to compare the pale and bloodless harangues of Father Zossima with the burning and inspired words of Dimitri and Ivan Karamazov to realize that Dostoevsky's truths fear general validity as greatly, and submit to it as hardly, as the average man to liberty. It is the author who speaks through the mouth of Zossima, just as much as through the mouth of his underground hero, but in the former case we hear nothing but the words of "omnitude" or common consciousness. See what happened to Dostoevsky with Father Therapont; when Dostoevsky tried to paint a great solitary, a Stylite who should please the fancy of common consciousness, he only succeeded in painting a figure that was almost comic... But when he painted Kirilov, whom he felt obliged to sentence to suicide, this silent, solitary man became under his pen a formidable, profoundly moving character.

Dostoevsky wanted Father Zossima's words to be intelligible to all, even to Claude Bernard. And, in fact, they pleased every one; they bring relaxation to those readers, who know quite well what life is and what death. But in reading these interminable sermons, one is amazed at the patience Dostoevsky must have expended on composing them. There is no trace of that spiritual tension, of those "imponderables" with which Dostoevsky knew how to move souls so deeply, and which gave Pascal the mysterious right to oppose his thinking reed against the whole universe.

It is astonishing that Dostoevsky dares to call Smerdiakov himself (though only once, it is true) a "contemplative" while Zossima and Alyosha, are men of "action"; who belong, therefore, to those representatives of common consciousness in whose eyes there is nothing above certainty and those self-evident truths which demand guarantees for everything, even for caprice. Most of Dostoevsky's journalistic work is a repetition of the words, speeches, and writings of Zossima and Therapont. Zossima advised, treated the sick, gave alms and consolation. Therapont exorcised. In order to act Dostoevsky saw himself forced to submit his second sight to his ordinary, normal, human vision, which agreed with the findings of his other senses, as with his reason. He wanted to teach men how to live, or, to use his own expression, how to come to an arrangement on earth with God". But it is even less possible to come to an arrangement on earth with God than without Him. Dostoevsky has told us so himself in "The Grand Inquisitor". Revelations are not given to man to make the life of man easier or to transform stones into bread; neither to change the course of history. History knows only one course, from the past, through the present, direct into the future; but revelation presupposes some second path. Any one wanting to gain a "historic" influence must give up his liberty and submit himself to necessity. Therefore, the Evil Spirit, the tempter, said to Christ: If thou wouldst possess "all the kingdoms of the world", thou must worship me! Any one who refuses to bow down and worship "twice two is four" will never become master of the world.

It is not I who say all these things; they are Dostoevsky's own words, when he is alone with himself. But once he is with others he tries to become like them. His own experience, what he had seen with his own eyes, became a heavy burden to him. Men want that experience of which Kant speaks, of which scientific philosophy speaks, the experience which turns stones into bread, into what can "satisfy" the world, and will once and for all transform caprice, the living individual, and the exception into the general principle, which will put law above life, regarding it as the very essence of life itself and viewing the intractability of "twice two is four", and the other "self-evident facts", as proof of their divine origin.

The result is extraordinary. Forced into the mould of "omnitude", Dostoevsky's ecstasies become slaves of daily necessity. Sometimes he will merely put the seal of the other world on the common opinions. He prophesies, strengthens the weak in spirit, quickens hope, persuades, sometimes even, like Therapont, he exorcises. None of hi s prophecies have been realized. He said that Russia would win Constantinople, that she would never know class warfare, that Western Europe would come to a bloody end and implore Russia's help in its agony, etc. One cannot arrange one's life on earth without God, but according to him one can arrange it with God. We see today how cruelly he was mistaken. Russia is drowned in blood, is the scene of horrors such as Europe has never known. And strange as it may seem, this happens, perhaps, precisely because those men who decided Russia's destiny for centuries tried to come to an arrangement with God on earth; they wished to be guided by those truths which were revealed to Dostoevsky through his second sight, but hidden from themselves.

Dostoevsky saw this himself; he tells us with enthusiasm in "The Grand Inquisitor" that men had forsaken God because He would not trouble about their earth

ly prosperity, would not "guarantee" their caprice. And yet he goes on preaching, transforming truths of the other world into judgments of universal validity. By his contact with the other world he had glimpsed ultimate freedom, but when he spoke to his fellow-men, he repeated with the Slavophiles that Russia was the freest country in existence and demanded, like a tyrant, that all should think as he did. He remembered what his experience had shown him, "a man may perhaps prefer suffering to well-being, destruction to construction"; here "everything has a beginning and nothing has an end"; "God demands the impossible"; "'twice two is four' is the principle of death", etc. And out of all these sudden, undefined, capricious, uncertain truths he tries to elaborate a political program, a collection of rules to form a guide to practical life.

The result is not difficult to imagine. The thirst for absolute liberty which torments him finally results in that na§áve Slavophile statement that Russia is the most free of all countries; a statement which Dostoevsky, who was not afraid of the law of contradiction, proclaims in the face of the despotic regime which led Russia over the brink of the abyss. "A man may perhaps prefer suffering to well-being" transforms itself for purposes of "action" into a formula somewhat similar in appearance, yet quite different in reality: "the Russian people love suffering". This truth was all too well known, even without Dostoevsky, to those who ruled Russia's destinies and who, by multiplying the sufferings of its people brought about the situation which we are witnessing today. One could speak at length on this subject, but I think silence would be preferable; all those to whom the destinies of Russia are dear understand only too well that those who control them "cannot defy both common sense and science with impunity".

One cannot demonstrate God. One cannot seek Him in history. God is "caprice" incarnate, who rejects all guarantees. He is outside history, like all that people hold to be to timi§ætaton.

This is the meaning of all Dostoevsky's works; and this too is the meaning of the enigmatical words of Euripides which we quoted at the head of this study:

tis d'o§àden, ei to dz§Ün men esti katthane§àn,to katthane§àv de dz§Ün;

September 1921.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances

<< | >>

Part I

REVELATIONS OF DEATH

ag§æn megistos kai eschatos ta§às psucha§às prokeitai.A supreme and final battle awaits the soul.

- PLOTINUS, Enneads I, vi, 7.

THE LAST JUDGMENTTolstoy's last works

...orth§æs happomenoi philosophias lel§Üthenai to§ís allous, hoti ouden allo epit§Üdeuousin §Ün§Üskein te kai tethnanai.Other men seem not to have noticed that those who truly embrace philosophy concern themselves with nothing else but dying and death.

- PLATO, Phaedo 64 A

1

Aristotle says somewhere that every one has his own particular world in his dreams, while in his waking state he lives in a world common to all. This statement is the basis, not only of Aristotle's philosophy, but also of all positive scientific philosophy, before and after him. Common sense also looks upon this as an indisputable truth. Can man give up self-evident truth? Certainly not. Nobody, not even God Himself, can ask this of him. Deus impossibile non jubet (God does not ask the impossible). That is a self-evident truth which is admitted equally by common sense, by science, and even by the Catholic Church, impregnated with mysticism though it may be.

But death takes no heed of this. It has its own truths, its own self¡ªevidence, its possibilities and its impossibilities, which do not agree with our ordinary ideas, and which we, therefore, cannot understand. Only a few exceptional men have succeeded, in rare moments of extreme tension and excitement, in hearing and understanding the mysterious language of death. This understanding was given to Tolstoy. What did death reveal to him? What were the impossibilities which were changed into possibilities for him? Death does, as a matter of fact, unlike common sense, demand the impossible of man. In spite of Aristotle, it drags him out of the world common to all. How does this happen? How can the impossible become possible?

Among Tolstoy's posthumous works there is a short, unfinished story called The Diary of a Madman. The subject is very simple. A rich landowner, having learned that an estate was for sale in the province of Penza, makes up his mind to go down, have a look at it and buy it. He is very pleased about it; according to his calculations, he will be able to buy it at a very low figure, almost for nothing. Then, suddenly, one night at an hotel on the way, without any apparent reason, he is seized by a horrible, insufferable anguish. Nothing in his surroundings has changed, nothing new has happened, but until now everything had always inspired him with confidence, everything had seemed to him to be normal, necessary, well - regulated, soothing; he had felt the solid earth beneath his feet and reality on all sides of him. No doubt, no questions! Nothing but answers! Then suddenly, in an instant, in the twinkling of an eye, everything is transformed as though by a magic wand. Peace, answers, the solid earth, consciousness of right, and the easy feeling of lightness, simplicity and certainty which springs from this ¡ª all suddenly disappear. Around him are nothing but looming questions with their inevitable train of importunate anxiety, of doubt, and senseless, gnawing, invincible terrors. The ordinary means by which these painful thoughts are usually routed are completely ineffectual.

"I tried to think of things which interested me; of the acquisition of the estate, of my wife. Not only did I find nothing pleasant in these thoughts, but they were all as nothing to me. The horror of my wasted life overshadowed everything. I tried to go to sleep. I lay down, but no sooner was I on my bed than terror roused me again. And anxiety! An anxiety like one feels before one is going to be sick, but it was moral. Fear, anguish - we think of death as terrible, but when we look back upon life, it is the agony of life which overwhelms us! Death and life seemed in some way to be confounded with one another. Something tore my existence to rags, and yet could not succeed in tearing it completely. I went o

nce more to look at my fellow-sleepers; I tried again to get to sleep; but terror was ever before me, red, white, and square. Something was tearing, but it still held."

Thus Tolstoy pitilessly strips himself before our eyes. There are few writers who show us truths like these. And if one wants, if one is able to see this truth - for even naked truth is not easy to see - then a whole series of problems arise which are out of all relation with our ordinary thoughts. How are we to apprehend these groundless terrors which so suddenly appeared, red, white, and square? In the world which is common to us all, there is not and cannot be a "suddenly"; there can be no action without a cause. And its terrors are not red, nor white, nor square. What happened to Tolstoy is a challenge to all normal, human consciousness. Now it is Tolstoy who has been suddenly and causelessly seized by terror; tomorrow it may be another, then a third, and one fine day it will be the whole of society, the whole of mankind who will be attacked. If we take seriously what we are told in The Diary of a Madman there is no third alternative; either we must repudiate Tolstoy and cut him off from our midst as lepers and others suffering from contagious diseases were cut off in the Middle Ages; or else, if we consider his experiences justifiable, we must be prepared for others to undergo the same, for the "world common to us all" to fall to pieces and men to begin to live in their own separate worlds, not in dreams but in their waking moments.

Common sense, and science which derives from it, cannot hesitate for a moment before this dilemma. Tolstoy is in the wrong with his senseless anxieties, his unreasonable terrors, and his mad uncertainty. It is "the world common to us all" which is right, with its solid beliefs, its eternal, satisfying truths, clear, defined, and accessible to all. If the person concerned had not been a world-famous writer, his fate would have been quickly decided; he would have been exiled from society as a dangerous and unhealthy member. But Tolstoy is the pride and glory of Russia; it is impossible to treat him like this. Although what he says appears utterly meaningless and unacceptable, one goes on listening to him, one goes on reckoning with him.

"Today," he continues, "they took me before the provincial council for a mental examination. Opinions were divided. They argued, and finally decided that I was not mad. But that was because I constrained myself not to speak frankly during the medical inspection. I was not frank because I am afraid of the lunatic asylum. I am afraid that there they would not allow me to accomplish my madman's work. They declared that I was subject to fits and other things of the sort, but that I was of sane mind. They certified this, but I know that I am mad."

It is beyond question that he is right, not they. All his life Tolstoy was aware that there was something in his soul driving him out of the world common to all. He tells us that it had happened to him before, although not often, to experience crises like that which occurred on the road to Penza. From childhood upwards, he would suddenly find himself overwhelmed on quite trivial occasions by intolerable terrors which would brutally deprive him of all joy in life and of all sense of the normality and natural balance of existence. He would be lying in his bed, warm, comfortable, at rest, thinking idly that all men are good and that they love one another. Suddenly he would hear his nurse and the house steward exchange a few disagreeable words and immediately the whole charm was broken. "I am ill and frightened: I no longer understand anything. Terror, icy terror takes possession of me and I bury my head under the blankets."

Another time he saw a little boy being beaten. "I had an attack. I began to sob and for a long time no one was able to console me. Those sobs were the first signs of my madness."

The third attack happened when his aunt told him the story of the Passion of Christ. He wanted to know why Christ had been so tortured. His aunt did not kn

ow what to answer. "And once again something took possession of me. I sobbed, I beat my head against the wall."

We have all been present when our neighbours have exchanged high words, we have seen children ill-treated, we have heard and read the story of the suffering of Christ. Tolstoy was not the only one. But no one else, or hardly any one, has reacted so violently, so irresistibly. People weep a little, and then forget; other impressions come to obliterate the first. But it was not given to Tolstoy to forget. The memories of his childhood were deeply graven in his soul, be even seems to have preserved them carefully, like a precious treasure, like Plato's mysterious anamnesis, a vague witness to another, unrealizable existence. And these impressions were waiting for the turn of the wheel when time should bring about their mastery and establish their right.

The pleasures, preoccupations, and all the innumerable business affairs of life naturally distracted Tolstoy's attention from his extraordinary visions for many years. And then, as he tells us, he had an instinctive dread of the madhouse, and an even greater dread of madness, of having to live in his own individual world instead of in the common world. Therefore he made desperate efforts to live like every one else, and to see only what is contained within everyday limits.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Last Judgment

<< | >>

2

The Diary of a Madman is in a sense the key to Tolstoy's work. If it had not been written by Tolstoy himself, we should certainly have looked upon it as a calumny, since we are accustomed to look upon great men as the incarnation of all the civil and even the military virtues. Indeed, had some one dared depict his existence to him as it is shown in the Diary a year or even a week before madness came upon him, he would himself have been profoundly indignant, and have regarded it as a criminal attack on his good name. As a matter of fact, the most poisonous calumny could not compare with the truth as Tolstoy shows it to us himself. He wanted to buy an estate, but he did not want to pay the proper price for it. He is looking out for some imbecile" (these are his own words) who will sell him a property for a song; then by cutting down and selling timber from it he will obtain a sum which will pay for the whole estate, which he will thus have acquired for nothing. He will certainly find an "imbecile" of this kind quite easily; good fortune attends the good hunter. Tolstoy patiently bides his time, reads the advertisements, collects information. If God does not send him a fool, then he will have to make it up at the expense of the peasants. He will buy his estate in some district where the peasants own very little land; thus he will get abundant labour at a starvation wage.

It is easy enough to prove that this story is not fiction, but that the landowner in question is Tolstoy himself, for we have only to look at one of his letters to his wife (No. 63). He was then traveling in the Penza district to look at an estate which he considered and in fact afterwards bought. I will give the whole letter:

"The night before last I slept at Arzamass, and a most extraordinary thing happened to me. At two o'clock in the morning I was seized by a strange anxiety, a fear, a terror such as I had never before experienced. I will tell you the details later, but I have never known such painful sensations, and may God preserve others from the same! I got up and gave the order to have my horses harnessed. While this was being done, I fell asleep, and woke up again quite well. Yesterday, on the journey, the same feeling recurred, but in a much milder form. Today I feel as well and happy as I can ever be when I am not with you. During my Journey I have felt as never before how near you and the children are to me. I can be alone so long as I am constantly occupied, as in Moscow, but the moment that I have got nothing to do, I simply feel that I cannot be alone."

This letter and The Diary of a Madman agree down to the last details; the purchase of an estate, the journey, the province of Penza, the town of Arzamass, the remembrance of his wife, the wild, unreasoning terror.

There is a firmly established tradition in literature, which is to show to the reader only the good side of a great man's existence. The "lower" truths are of no use to us; what can we do with them? We are convinced that truths are not necessary to us for their own sakes, but only in so far as they can help us to action. This is the position taken up, for example, by Strakhov in writing Dostoevsky's biography, as he himself admits in a letter to Tolstoy which was only published in 1913.

"All the time that I was writing I had to struggle against a feeling of disgust which kept rising in me. I tried to stifle my evil thoughts. Help me to get rid of them! I cannot look upon Dostoevsky either as a good or a happy man. He was malicious, envious, and debauched. Throughout his whole life he was a prey to passions which would have rendered him miserable and ridiculous if he had not been so clever and so wicked. I remembered these feelings vividly while I was writing his biography. In Switzerland once he treated his servant so abominably in my presence that the man could stand it no longer and cried out, "But I am a man too!" I remember how these words struck me as reflecting the ideas of a free Swiss on the rights of man, and addressed to one who was for ever preaching to us about humanist feelings. Such scenes occurred frequently, he was unable to control his bad temper. Many times I answered his ravings with silence, when he burst out suddenly and often perversely, like an old woman; but once or twice I did break out and say very disagreeable things to him.

But he always got the better of ordinary people, and the worst of it was that he enjoyed it and never genuinely repented of his bad behaviour. He liked wickedness and gloried in it. Vistovatov (a professor of Dorpat University) told me how he had boasted to him of having seduced in her bath a little girl who had been brought to him by her governess. Among the characters of his books, the ones most like him are the hero of The Notes from Underground, Svidrigailov, and Stavrogin. Katov refused to publish one of the scenes with Stravrogin (the rape, etc.), but Dostoevsky read it aloud here to a large company of people. With all this, he was inclined to sickly sentimentality, and exalted humanitarian dreams, and it is these dreams, his literary gifts, and his tenderness of heart which endear him to us. In fact, all his novels are an attempt to exonerate their author; they show that the most hideous villainy can exist in a man side by side with the noblest feelings. This is a little commentary to my biography; I could describe that side of Dostoevsky's character; I remember many other incidents even more remarkable than those which I have quoted; my story would have been more genuine; but let the truth perish; let us go on exhibiting the beautiful side of life, just as we always do on every occasion."

I do not know if in the whole of literature there are many documents more valuable than this. I am not even sure whether Strakhov himself really understood the meaning and significance of what he admitted to Tolstoy. Many men in recent time

s have declared that a lie is better than the truth. Oscar Wilde and Nietzsche have said it, and even Pushkin declares that "The lie which elevates us is dearer to us than a legion of base truths ". But they were all addressing the reader, teaching him. Strakhov is quite simply and sincerely making a confession, and this gives his words a special force and significance. It is probable that this letter produced a great impression on Tolstoy, who was just then finding the burden of the conventional lie very hard to bear, and burned with the desire to purify himself by a full confession. For he himself was one of the priests of the supreme lie, and how beautiful and beguiling that lie was!

Like Strakhov, Tolstoy taught us to exhibit the beautiful side of existence and to hide the truth. He wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, glorifying the existence of the country gentleman while he himself was trying to buy estates for a song from imbeciles, exploiting the labour of landless peasants, and so on. All this was going on, and much of the kind besides. But it all seemed lawful, even holy to him, because it helped to maintain the existence which is common to us all. If you turn aside from it, you will have to build your own world for yourself. This is just what happened to the hero of The Diary of a Madman. He saw that he had to choose; either his wife and his neighbours who attacked his new ideas were right, and he really was ill and in need of treatment - or else all mankind are ill and afflicted with madness. The title The Diary of a Madman would cover everything which Tolstoy wrote after the age of fifty. And it seems to me no mere chance that Tolstoy borrowed this title from Gogol. A young lady to whom Gogol's The Diary of a Madman was once read in my presence, showed great astonishment that Gogol was able to describe so accurately the minute details of the state of an unbalanced mind. And indeed, what could have been the attraction of this subject to a young writer? Why describe chaos and madness? What can it matter to us that Popristchin, the hero, imagines himself to be the King of Spain, that a small clerk falls in love with the daughter of his chief, etc.?

It is evident that the unbalanced imagination of the madman did not seem to Gogol so absurd and wholly meaningless as it does to us, just as this man's peculiar private world did not seem so unreal to him as it does to us. Popristchin and his madness attracted him; the strange world and the miserable existence of his hero had an interest for the future author of the Correspondence with Friends. Why else should he have troubled about the absurd and pitiable and, at first glance, totally meaningless things! It is to be remarked that Popristchin's was not the only madness which absorbed Gogol's attention at this period of his life. It was at this time too that he wrote Vii, The Terrible Revenge, Old-fashioned Gentlefolk, and it would be wrong to think in these tales Gogol is only an impartial observer of the customs and life of the people.

The horrible death which so abruptly wrenches Afanassy Ivanovich and Pulcheria Ivanovna from the torpor of their vegetating existence clearly troubled Gogol's imagination constantly in his youth. It is evident that the mysterious horror of popular tales and myths intoxicated him, that he himself lived in a fantastic world just as much as in the real world of his fellow-men. The sorcerers, witches, and demons which he depicts so inimitably, all the terrors, all the delights which awaken in the human heart upon contact with the mysteries of the other world, had an irresistible attraction for him. If you want to pin fast Gogol's inner nature, the essence of him, all that was different in him to the outer world; if you want to know where to look for the true Gogol, whether in the place assigned to him in the history of art, or where his capricious fancy spreads its wings; you will not have sufficient material to answer your questions unless, indeed, you will turn to one of the modern theories of knowledge, which, following Aristotle's example, have arrogated to themselves the right to trace the limits between the waking and dreaming states, between reality and imagination. But if you are not of those who blindly believe in ready-made theories, if you are sometimes capable of freeing yourself, if only for a moment, from the hypnotism of modern ideas, then you will be less categorical in your condemnation of Gogol's e

fforts to paint that mysterious reality, so greatly discredited by theory, so inaccessible and yet so alluring. Then perhaps you will admit that even in Dead Souls Gogol was not trying to reform manners, but to understand his own destiny and that of humanity. He himself has told us that his apparent laughter hid invisible tears and that when we laugh at Chichikov and Nozdrev, we are really laughing at their creator.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Last Judgment

<< | >>

3

Unlike Tolstoy, Gogol even in his earliest works approached that dividing line which separates ordinary, everyday reality, accessible to all men, from the eternal mystery which is hidden from mortal eyes. He draws near to this line sometimes with laughter and sometimes in all seriousness. He enjoys leaning over the abyss and experiencing the agony of vertigo. He was convinced that he had the strength to draw back from it when he wanted to. He felt himself bound to the common world by solid ties, and the incursions which he allowed himself into the region of the mysterious were in his eyes only pleasant trips which presented no particular danger. That was what he thought. But fate had other plans for him. This became clear at the end of his life. His Dead Souls and Fragments collected from my Correspondence with Friends were his Diary of a Madman. Even Pushkin, who could understand everything, did not grasp the real significance of Dead Souls. He thought that the author was grieving for Russia, ignorant, savage, and outdistanced by the other nations. But it is not only in Russia that Gogol discovers "dead souls." All men, great and small, seem to him lunatics, lifeless, automata which obediently and mechanically carry out commandments imposed on them from without. They eat, they drink, they sin, they multiply; with stammering tongue they pronounce meaningless words. No trace of free will, no sparkle of understanding, not the slightest wish to awake from their thousand-year sleep. Although none of them, of course, has so much as heard of Aristotle, they are all profoundly convinced that their sleep, their life, and their common world are the only supreme, definite reality. The Correspondence really does no more than comment on Dead Souls. In it we can see the secret aspirations, the secret hopes of the people's soul appearing under another form. Here once more are Vii, the sorcerers and witches and demons, all the phantasmagoria of which we have already spoken.

But this fantastic world seems to Gogol to be much more real than the world where Chichikov boasts to Sobakevich of his dead souls and where Pietak stuffs his guests till they are ill, where Pliuchkin hoards, and Ivan Ivanovich quarrels with Ivan Nikiforovich, etc.: "Here verily one can say: 'Let us flee, let us flee to our dear fatherland.' But how can we flee? How escape hence? Our fatherland is the country whence we are come; and there dwells our Father." Thus spoke Plotinus; thus Gogol felt and taught; only death and the madness of death are able to awaken man from the nightmare of existence. This is what Tolstoy's Diary of a Madman also tells us - not the short unfinished story which bears this title, but the whole of what he wrote after Anna Karenina. His "madness" lay in the fact that everything which had formerly seemed to him to be real and to have a solid existence, now appeared illusory, whereas all that had seemed illusory and unreal now seemed to him the only reality.

The review the Russian Archive published in i868 an article by Tolstoy which, for no reason that I know, has never been republished since; it is called "A Few Words about War and Peace." It contains some extremely significant passages showing Tolstoy's attitude towards serfdom. He had been reproached with not having sufficiently depicted the character of the times in War and Peace.

"To these reproaches," Tolstoy declares, "I should reply as follows: I know quite well what are the characteristics of the times, which are supposed to be wanting in my novel: the horrors of serfdom, the burial of women alive, the flogging by men of their grown sons, Saltychikha,[1] etc., but I do not consider that this character, as we imagine it today, conforms to reality, and therefore I did not want to describe it. I have studied letters, memoirs, and hearsay, but have not found that these horrors were more frequent then than now or at any other period. People loved in those days, were jealous, sought truth, virtue, or were the slaves of their passions just as now; the intellectual and moral life was the same - often, indeed, more refined than today, especially in the upper classes. If we represent these times to ourselves as particularly cruel and brutal, it is only because the novels, stories, and legends of that period have only preserved what was exceptionally brutal or strikingly savage."

Tolstoy was forty years old when he wrote these lines. It is the age when the intellectual powers reach their zenith. In Tolstoy, at that age, the days of Arakcheev awaken no horror, no disgust; yet we remember that as a child lie gave way to mad despair on seeing a little boy beaten or hearing his nurse and the steward quarrelling. He certainly knew what to think of Arakcheev and his men, he also knew what serfdom was and the condition of the peasants under the despotic rule of the landed proprietors; but he did not want to "see" it; reason, which should know all things, forbade. Why? Because such a vision would have been useless. It would have destroyed that ordo et connexio rerum which had established itself historically in the face of so many difficulties, and upset the common world outside whose boundaries there exists nothing but madness and death. Unvarnished truth, that truth which runs contrary to the vital needs of human nature, is worse than any lie. This is what Tolstoy thought when he wrote War and Peace, when he was still entirely possessed by Aristotle's ideas, when he was afraid of madness and the asylum and hoped that he would never have to live in an individual world of his own. But when he was obliged to say to himself, "They certified that I was sane, but I know that I am mad"; when he felt himself expelled from the world common to all, then he was obliged, willy-nilly, to look at things with his own eyes and not with every one else's. Then the character of Arakcheev's day appeared to him quite otherwise. Formerly he had spoken of "the refined existence of the upper classes ". Later he spoke of the cruel, coarse, and debased "uppermost classes".

The outward seeming is spick and span and elegant, but beneath this beautiful appearance there are folly, emptiness, vile cruelty, narrow, inhuman selfishness. The Rostovs, Bezukhovs, and Bolkonskis change before our eyes into Sobakevich, Nozdrev, and Chichikov. There is no longer even Gogol's laughter, only his tears.

In another short story, also unfinished, "The Morning after the Ball," written in 1903, when the author was eighty years old, Tolstoy, with obvious intention, confronts his old and new visions. The story is in two parts; the first describes, with an art unequaled in Russian literature before or since, a gay, elegant, and amusing ball. It is a really marvelous ball: there are music and dancing, there is champagne, the young people are of the highest class, charming and aristocratic; naturally there is also a charming young lady there and a young man who is in love with her; it is he who tells the story. An hour after the ball, the narrator, still gay, excited, and possessed by his "refined" emotions, is witness of quite another scene in the street; a Tartar deserter is being made to run the gauntlet. And this is being done at the orders of the colonel, the father

of the charming young girl, the very man who, to the universal delight, himself had danced the mazurka with his daughter at the end of the ball, displaying such charm and old-world gallantry. I have said that the scene at the ball is described by Tolstoy with inimitable art; the torture of the Tartar is described with no less strength and feeling. I will not quote extracts, for the story is well known. The important point is to compare and contrast the two ways of looking at reality. And considering the whole of Tolstoy's work, one might say, metaphorically of course and with certain reservations, that in his youth Tolstoy described life as a fascinating ball; and later, when he was old, it was like a running of the gauntlet. When he was old, it was not only the time of Arakcheev and Nicholas I which seemed to him like a mad and oppressive nightmare; he could not even endure our own comparatively mild ways. His own family became unendurable to him, that family which he had described in such idyllic colours in Anna Karenina. And he saw himself under an aspect as hideous as that of the people with whom he lived. As it is said in Scripture, one must hate one's father and mother, wife and children, and even oneself; there is evidently no other way for the man who is shut out from the world common to us all.

Tolstoy says somewhere that autobiography is the best form of literature. I think this is not quite true, nor can it be so under the conditions of our human existence. We all belong too much to the society in which we live and we live too much for that society, and therefore we are accustomed not only to speak, but also to think as society demands. To write the true history of one's life, to make a full and sincere confession, to tell, that is to say, not what society expects and requires of us, but what really happened, would be to put one s own neck in the pillory. Society does not forgive those who break its laws; and its verdict is merciless. We all know this, and even the bravest among us adapt ourselves to its rules. Tolstoy's Diary has not yet been published in full, but the autobiographies and memoirs which we know confirm what we have said. No one has yet succeeded in telling the truth about himself in a direct form, not even the partial truth. This is as true of St. Augustine's Confessions as it is of Rousseau's, of the autobiography of John Stuart Mill or of Nietzsche's Diary. None of these works tells us the most intimate, the deepest, the truly individual things about their author. Men reveal the most painful and significant truth only when not speaking directly of themselves. If Dostoevsky had left us his autobiography it would have been no different from the biography written by Strakhov; he would have described to us the beautiful side of his life. But the real Dostoevsky, as Strakhov himself has told us, is to be found in The Notes from Underground and the Svidrigailov of Crime and Punishment.

It is the same with Ibsen. Do not look for him in his letters and his memoirs; you will not find him there. But he has put the whole of himself into The Wild Duck and his other plays. It is just the same with Gogol; it is not in the Confessions of an Author that you will find him, but in Dead Souls. This is true of all authors.

One must not ask for sincere autobiographies from writers. Fiction was invented precisely to give men the possibility of expressing themselves freely. But, you will say, must we believe in the truth, as we did and still do believe in lies? Is it possible? Do we know what the truth will give us? But we must admit that the lie that we worship has not given us very much...

Moreover, I will say in Consolation to those who are afraid to break with tradition, that the truth is not really so dangerous as is generally believed. For even if brought into the open, it will not become common property; this is the primordial decree of fate. No one will see the truth who is not destined to see it, even though it appear naked at every street corner. Furthermore, as long as the world shall last, there will always be people who, either for the sake of peace or from an unquiet conscience, will build up sublime lies for their neighbours. And these people have always been and will always be the masters of human t

hought.

Be this as it may, autobiographies contain no more of the truth than biographies. He who wants to learn the truth must first learn the art of reading works of literature. It is a difficult art. To know how to read is not enough. It is for this reason that rough drafts, and notes thrown hastily on paper, are so valuable. A sketch, a few words, a half formed thought, can often tell us more than a finished work; the man has not yet had time to adapt his visions to the demands of society. The introduction which was to prepare the way, and the conclusion which rounds it off, are alike missing. The brutal, naked truth rises to its full height, like a rock above the waters,, and no one has yet attempted to "justify" its stark savagery, neither the author himself nor his sedulous biographer.

This is why I have lingered so long over The Diary of a Madman, an unfinished and incomplete story. Tolstoy in his finished works obstinately insists that he is working for the cause of common sense; that his one object is to strengthen, men's faith in common sense. Only once, in this short sketch, did he allow himself to call what happened in his soul by its true name. "They certified that I was sane; but I know that I am mad." This confession gives us the key to what is most important and significant in Tolstoy's hidden life.

We must not, however, forget that Tolstoy was not always in this state of "madness", even during his last years. There were only passing attacks; sometimes he lived in his own particular world, sometimes in the world common to all. Wild unreasoning terrors suddenly welled up, God knows whence they disappeared, overthrowing and breaking the treasures which reason had amassed; they dissipated themselves and vanished, God knows how or whither, as abruptly as they had arisen. And then Tolstoy became a normal man once more, he was like every one else, except for certain strange ways, pale reflections of the storms which had passed or which were brewing. Hence the inequalities of his character and actions, the flagrant contradictions on which his many enemies have maliciously insisted. Tolstoy was even more afraid of madness than of death, yet at the same time he hated and despised his normal state with his whole soul. And his restless, impetuous inconsequence reveals more to us than the even and reasonable consistency of his accusers.

[1] The mistress of Arakcheev, Alexander I's favourite. She was killed by peasants, who were driven to desperation by her tyranny and cruelty.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Last Judgment

<< | >>

4

Many people, in the effort to calm themselves and dissipate the uneasiness which seizes them on reading Tolstoy's works, have thought to explain his struggles and his wild outbursts as the result of his fear of death. They think that such an explanation would free them once and for all from every difficulty and would also re-establish in their old strength the solutions which he had rendered null and void. This proceeding is not new, but it is effective. Aristotle had already suggested it when, with firm hand, he traced a definite line to mark the limit beyond which human endeavour and inquiry must not go. The ultimate mystery

must not be approached, the idea of death must not be allowed to take possession of the human soul.

But Plato taught otherwise. In one of his most inspired dialogues, he does not fear to reveal to all men that great and eternally hidden truth that philosophy is nothing else but a preparation for death and a slow dying. He did not fear to say it, because he knew that though this truth were to be cried aloud from the four corners of the market-place, yet those whom he calls hoi polloi and Nietzsche calls "numerous, too numerous ", would never hear it. If Plato is right, not Aristotle, then we must allow that during the last decades of his life Tolstoy shows us an example of genuine philosophic activity. All that he did had but one object, one significance; to loosen the bonds which bound him to this world common to all men, to throw overboard all ballast that gave his vessel equilibrium, but at the same time prevented it from leaving the earth. To the uninitiated Tolstoy's work often seems criminal and sacrilegious. He tramples underfoot everything that men hold most dear, he outrages all that they hold most sacred; shakes the foundations of society, and poisons the most innocent joys. He brings to us, and can bring to us, nothing but suffering.

"What accursed Christianity is this?" cries Princess Cheremissov in all sincerity, in Tolstoy's posthumous drama The Light shines in Darkness. She is right. Her son is on his trial; he has refused to perform his military service, converted by the new doctrine that the hero of the play, Nicolai Ivanovich (or rather, Tolstoy), has proclaimed. This means, of course, that he has ruined his life absolutely. Nicolai Ivanovich's own wife expresses herself no less strongly. "How cruel you are!" she says to her husband. "What sort of Christianity is this? It is just malice." The words of the two women sum up all the indignation, the legitimate and natural anger which Tolstoy's aspirations and ideals awakened among his nearest and dearest.

"If you were not my sister," says the sister of Nicolai Ivanovich's wife to her, "if you were a stranger, and Nicolai Ivanovich was not your husband, but a simple acquaintance, I should find all this very original and charming and might even agree with him myself. But when I see your husband indulging in such folly, downright folly, then I can no longer control myself from saying what I think." Almost every one talks like this, every one is ready to admit that Tolstoy's ideas are original, interesting, full of every possible quality, so long as he confines himself to argument. But directly he tries to realize them, his neighbours rise up against him as one man.

Tolstoy cannot and does not give up his own individual world for our sakes. But his family has its own faith, no less deeply rooted; for it the common world is the only real one. That world alone holds the first and only authentic truth, the ultimate truth, that truth which Tolstoy himself, not so very long ago, as he said himself, was ready to defend "with dagger and pistol ", to whose glory he raised a magnificent monument in War and Peace. Two truths stand opposed to one another, and hurl anathema at one another. "Si quis mundum ad Dei gloriam conditum esse negavarit, anathema sit," proclaimed one truth. Who so denies that the world was created to the glory of God, let him be anathema! While the other replies no less imperiously, "Si quis dixerit, mundum ad Dei gloriam conditum esse, anathema sit." Whoso affirms that the world was created to the glory of God, let him be anathema!

Who shall arbitrate in this discussion between the representatives of two so opposite truths? Does the world exist for God, or for man? Are Tolstoy's relatives right in remaining faithful to the old law, or is Tolstoy right, the renegade, he who only yesterday was among the supporters of that law which he attacks today? Whom can one ask? Who can be judge between men whom the blood-tie unites indissolubly, and who suddenly hate one another so bitterly? Can there be such a judge? If we are to believe Tolstoy's own words, he has no doubt about the matt

er. He insists with particular warmth on this in his discussion with the young priest.

Nicolai Ivanovich. One must believe, believe, there is no doing without faith; but one must not believe what other people say, but what one's own thought and reason teaches one to believe... believe in God, in the true and eternal life.

The Priest. Reason can deceive; each man has his own reason.

Nicolai Ivanovich (warmly). That is a frightful blasphemy. God has given us a sacred instrument with which to discover the truth; it is the only thing that can bring us together. And we do not believe in it.

The Priest. But how can we believe when there are so many differences of opinion, so many contradictions?

Nicolai Ivanovich. What differences of opinion? That twice two is four, that we must not do unto others what we would not have them do unto us, that everything has a cause, and other truths of this sort, we can all accept, because they all agree with our reason, but when we are told that God was revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai, or that Buddha flew away on a ray of the sun, or that Mohammed was received up into heaven, in these and such-like matters each of us has his own opinion.

Nicolai Ivanovich is here expressing an idea which seems to have dominated Tolstoy's mind even to the end of his life; reason is the same in all men and remains itself ever the same. It says the same to every one and demands the same of every one. But how was it, then, that up to the age of fifty Tolstoy failed to hear the imperious voice of his "reason"? And why did he feel such abject terror when he first felt that it was impossible to escape from this master? Why did he find himself obliged to say: "They certified that I was only subject to attacks of madness, but I know that I am mad"?

The attentive reader can hardly doubt that Tolstoy expressed the state of his soul more successfully in The Diary of a Madman than in the dialogue which I have just quoted. Reason, which is based upon the world common to us all, which furnishes us with truths like "twice two is four" and "nothing happens without a cause" - this reason not only cannot justify and explain these new terrors and anxieties of Tolstoy's; it condemns them pitilessly as unreasonable, motiveless, arbitrary, and consequently unreal and visionary.

Tolstoy himself has told us that they sprang up without any cause; that they were always unreasonable; we shall see this for ourselves. For reason, Tolstoy says again, "twice two is four" and "there is no action without a cause are indisputable truths. Then how could reason sanction Tolstoy's new doctrine, which was born under the direct action of his unreasoning terrors, which are only impostors having no claim to reality?

And behold the consequences of this doctrine:

The family had lived in peace and unity twenty-five years. But directly Tolstoy tried to live in his own way there was an end of friendship, peace, and love. The members were unable to separate, but their common life was like the existence of convicts who are bound together by a single chain. If it is true that the work of reason is to unite, it is obvious that after Tolstoy's conversion the family was dominated by a principle directly hostile to reason. All his relatives were gathered against him; no one found the arguments which he advanced to defend and excuse himself in the least convincing. On the contrary, they all felt, even if they did not understand, that behind these arguments lay that madness of which Tolstoy speaks in The Diary of a Madman, and they struggled against him a

s best they could, by prayers and supplications, by threats and even by force.

The final scene of the tragedy reflects, as in a mirror, the hell into which a family once happy fell under the guidance of reason and the new "accursed" Christianity. We see only too well how illusory were Tolstoy's hopes of union and "unification". Upstairs, in the brilliantly lighted rooms of the first floor, an evening party is being given; there are music, dancing, flowers, gallant French speeches... in a room on the ground floor the master of the house is preparing for flight; no matter whither, only not to have to witness any longer the folly which his wife and children regard as the essence and ornament of existence. He would have gone; neither his wife, his children, nor any one in the world would have made him change his mind. Then his wife found a last argument - threat. She threatened to throw herself under a train if he left the house. Nicolai Ivanovich yields, not to reason but to threats. And while the younger members of the family are carelessly amusing themselves, quite blind to the hideous struggle which is going on between their father and mother, Nicolai Ivanovich sees his last hope in the triumph of reason perish. He submits, he promises to stay and continue his existence against his convictions, but still refuses to acknowledge that this submission signifies the final defeat of reason. But even this consolation does not last for long. With that courage and honesty which does not shrink from the most staggering contradictions, Tolstoy describes, immediately after the scene of the struggle between husband and wife, another scene, no less painful, and one which cuts at the foundation of all the rights and prerogatives of reason.

The mother of Prince Cheremissov intervenes (the mother, that is, of the young man who is in prison for refusing to perform his military service). Carried away by her despair, and fully convinced of the justice of her cause, she attacks Nicolai Ivanovich and his Christianity with such bitterness and such force that he no longer has the strength to defend his cause against her. All the words, all the arguments with which he is accustomed to confront his adversaries in his calmer moments now seem to him empty and meaningless. What can he say to a mother mad with grief, whose son is going deliberately to his destruction? Whatever Nicolai Ivanovich may say, whatever effort he may make to persuade her, she refuses to admit that it is right and just that her son, her only support, her only hope, should be shut up in a madhouse amongst savage, howling creatures, or else sent to a disciplinary company amongst soldiers deprived of all human rights, who have almost lost their human faces. "You and Nicolai Ivanovich have invented some strange brand of Christianity. It is not Christianity, it is a diabolical doctrine which makes every one suffer."

In the eyes of Princess Cheremissov, of Nicolai Ivanovich's wife and children, in the eyes of the whole world, this new doctrine is an accursed and diabolical teaching. To act as it teaches is to die. This is in fact what Stepa, Nicolai Ivanovich's son, says. But the father does not look upon this as a refutation. "Yes," he answers, "and if you were to die for your neighbours, it would be a very fine thing, both for yourself and for others." Such is the paradoxical logic to which the human soul is brought at last. Unreasoning terrors give rise to a courage Just as unreasoning. To die is not terrible, it is our stupid, inept, useless existence which is t&rible. Our life is death, our death is life, or the introduction to life. This is what Tolstoy says to those around him, and what they do not understand and never will understand. Is it possible, indeed, to understand this? Did Tolstoy himself understand it?

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Last Judgment

<< | >>

5

Tolstoy has often been compared with Socrates. Amongst Tolstoy's admirers and pupils there were many who thought him a perfectly sinless being, almost as the ancients did Socrates. But he saw himself and declared himself to be otherwise. He looked upon himself as a great sinner, the greatest sinner who had ever existed. And it was not only the first half of his life (when he did not yet know the truth) which inspired him with such profound disgust; his old age appeared to him just as hideous as his youth. "Reason, the divine instrument" whose praises he sang so solemnly, led him along no broad straight path, but ever farther, ever deeper into impenetrable wilderness. And if nevertheless he continued to advance, it was because all roads back were barred to him. But he had now convinced himself that "reason" had ceased to serve him, and that although he was still advancing, he knew not whither he was going.

It is this which distinguishes him from Socrates, or at any rate from the Socrates who figures in the pages of history. Tolstoy, too, taught, preached urbi et orbi. The world received the words of the old man of Yasnaia Poliana with dread and respect. If our times had possessed a Delphic oracle, it would certainly have declared Tolstoy to be the wisest of men. But Tolstoy himself knew that he was a weak and sick old man, and as his fame spread, so his consciousness of his own impotence increased. It is true that he was avid of glory. But he only sought it to have the right and the possibility of trampling it under foot. Not the illusory glory of the false hero, but even the genuine glory of the sage is only to be desired that it may be renounced. This, like every other revelation, is a great and terrible truth. Tolstoy speaks of it to us in one of his posthumous stories, Father Sergius, with his unique courage and frankness.

Father Sergius, a monk and "staretz," had been called Prince Kassatkin in the world. He had been a brilliant officer in the Guards. When young, he had expected much of life, and would have attained it if a "mischance" had not ruined all his hopes. I will not stop to tell what happened to the young prince. But even those who have not read Father Sergius may believe Tolstoy: the circumstances of Prince Kassatkin's life were such as to make it quite impossible for him to go on living in the world.

Is there any reality in that world of prayer and discipline which a man enters when he takes the vow? Prince Kassatkin did not know; but he felt that there was no room for him in that other world outside the convent walls. He set himself to his new duties with the sincerity and conscientiousness which were his distinguishing characteristics. After a certain length of time he acquired an immense reputation. The whole of Russia knew his name, pilgrims repaired to the monastery from all parts, attracted by the fame of the holy monk. "He himself was sometimes astonished that he, Prince Kassatkin, had become a saint, a worker of miracles; but it was impossible to doubt it; he could not fail to believe in the miracles which he himself performed, from the little cripple boy to the old woman who recovered her sight in answer to his prayer. Strange though it might be, it was a fact. Victory, perfect happiness seemed to have been attained. It was time to rest in the proud consciousness of the heavenly reward justly won after so much effort; every one proclaimed Stepan Kassatkin a great saint, a worker of miracles. Was not this unanimity satisfying? Is not the voice of the people the voice of God? If all men are deceived, where can we find the truth? Father Sergius, the old man, the celebrated teacher, realized with horror that he could not answer these questions. He had long known that one could have no confidence in oneself, he now realized that it was not possible to trust in others either. Collective suggestion is more powerful than auto-suggestion, but truth is not the sourc

e of its strength. Father Sergius (or let us openly say Tolstoy) remembered his old life in the world, and compared it to his life in the monastery. And to his great horror, he was obliged to admit that it was not the supreme truth but human prejudice which he quite involuntarily still obeyed in everything, just as he had always done. He said to himself: "People come from a great distance to seek me, they write about me in the newspapers, the emperor knows me, Europe - unbelieving Europe knows me..." But can it be otherwise? Must not a saint be universally honoured? We know that the supreme task of reason is to collect all men together in a single holy place, to collect them in a single confession of faith, around some unique fact.

But herein lies Tolstoy's great and mysterious gift, that when he nears his goal he becomes convinced that he is not going whither he should have gone. There is at bottom no difference between the brilliant Guards officer who carries out conscientiously all his military and worldly duties and the holy sage whom crowds of admirers flock to see from all quarters of the earth. They both live in the world common to all men, and consequently feel the attraction of the earth and dread of heaven. Reason has deceived Father Sergius; all his efforts have been in vain. After a long and arduous pilgrimage he finds himself at the same place from which he started. "When he preached to men, when he blessed them, when he prayed for the sick, when he counseled and guided, when those whom he had helped by his miracles expressed their gratitude to him, he could not help rejoicing, could not help being concerned with the consequences of his actions, with his influence on men. He knew that he was like a flaming torch, and the more he felt this, the more he was aware that the divine fire which burned in him grew pale and feeble." "Is what I am doing for God or for men ?" This was the question which tortured him and to which he could not, or rather he dared not reply. He felt at the bottom of his soul that the devil had changed the object of his actions, that he was working for man and not for God. He felt this, for while it had formerly been painful to him to be roused out of his solitude, now solitude was painful to him. His visitors weighed on him, exhausted him, but fundamentally they delighted him with their praises.

Such were the thoughts which pursued Tolstoy. But at the time that he wrote Father Sergius it may be remarked that he was doing an extraordinary amount. He was not only writing and preaching, but improving the condition of the peasants, organizing famine relief on a great scale, consoling the unfortunate, and cutting his own wants down to the minimum, for he refused not only superfluities but even what would in a monastery have been regarded as necessities.

He ploughed, cobbled, kept his own room. If any one could have felt justifiable holy pride (the sancta superbia which is permitted to Catholic monks), if any one had a right to enjoy the fruits of his actions, it would appear to have been Tolstoy. But suddenly a terror overcame him, "red, white, and square, tearing the soul to rags". You would be quite wrong if, in your haste to discover a satisfactory defence, you tried to explain away these words as extreme humility. Haste is altogether a mistake, it ruins all possibility of comprehension. Furthermore, there is really nothing to be explained here; there is no need to fit the events of Tolstoy's life into general ideas. We have left explanations far behind, down there in that world common to all, where men act, where actions are everything, where works justify existence. Now all this is changed. Activity, working for mankind, even the most useful, the most disinterested action, comes from the devil, and is worthless in the eyes of God. Works, even the holiest, do not save the soul, but destroy it.

Father Sergius underwent the same experience as Luther of old. Luther, too, after entering the monastery to save his soul through holy works, suddenly felt with horror the conviction that in donning the monk's robes he had entered the devil's service. "When," he said later - just like Tolstoy - "I took the vows and condemned myself to the heavy pains of the monastic life, I cut myself loose f

rom God." Or, in his own words: "Ecce, Deus, tibi voveo impietatem et blasphemiam per totam meam vitam" (Behold, God, I vow to Thee impiety and blasphemy all my life long). But if one cannot save oneself through good works, if even good works are not pleasing in God's sight - what then?

Tolstoy was no longer capable of giving a satisfactory answer to this question, of pronouncing, that is, words acceptable to reason, individual or collective. Everything in his soul was in confusion; he had crossed over the borderline into the country where human vision is no longer able to see the exact outlines of things. A thick darkness lay round about him, in which he, who had always hitherto lived in light and loved light before everything, not only could no longer act, but felt that nothing which men are accustomed to do in the light of day could be accomplished at all. It was impossible even to think, for men usually think in order to act; but here there are no acts, no works, and can be none. Therefore one must learn to think quite differently from how one used to think in the ordinary world. Everything must be re-created, begun all over again... Father Sergius "began to pray to God: 'Lord, King of Heaven, Consoler, Spirit of Truth, come down upon us, purify us of all stain, and save our souls, Most Blessed One. Deliver me from the stain of human glory which oppresses me.' Having spoken these words he remembered how often he had already prayed thus, and how vain his words and prayers had been in this respect. They had accomplished miracles for others, but had not prevailed with God to deliver him from his miserable passion."

Neither prayers nor good works are any help beyond a certain limit; just as, years before, the recollection of his wife and his estate had been wholly powerless to save Tolstoy from the terrors which attacked him. In that soul, once so proud, so self-confident, so fond of light, of precise and clear order, there reigned now nothing but chaos and impenetrable darkness.

Not a living thought, not a living feeling; all was dead save despair. "He asked himself whether he loved any one; did he love Sofia Ivanovna, or Father Serapion? Had he had any impulse of love towards any of those people who had visited him that day, towards that learned young man with whom he had conversed in such an instructive fashion, thinking only of displaying his intelligence and his capacity to keep abreast of modern thought? Their affection gave him pleasure, he had need of it, but he himself felt no love. There was no love in him, no humility, no purity either." And this, after ten years of a hermit's existence! How had this happened? Why had this punishment struck Tolstoy?

I fear that the reader will not believe Tolstoy, or will suspect him of exaggeration. It is even more probable that he will tire of following Tolstoy in his aimless wanderings, across infinite deserts, and sands gleaming under a torrid sky, where the oases turn out to be mere cheating mirages. Why does he torment himself? Why should we torment ourselves with him? There is no need to suffer with him; he who is weary has every right to stay behind and seek other, more peaceful regions. Tolstoy's prayers and good works are valuable precisely for those who lag behind, as he tells us himself. As always, Tolstoy is a magician and worker of miracles for others, but not for himself. He continues to teach and to preach to the end of his life. After his death, people will still learn from his books; and a legend will spring up round his actions. But all that he taught to others was useless to himself. There is only one thing left for him, to take flight, to flee without a look backward, without thought of what he leaves behind or consideration of what awaits him at his journey's end. The forces on which he reckoned, his reason and his virtue, have betrayed him. And this Father Sergius who is honoured by Russia and all Europe, by the whole world, Christian and heathen, flees from his cell, like a thief in the night, exchanging his monk's robe for a simple peasant kaftan.

And as though to complete the bewilderment of the reader, already sufficiently baffled, Tolstoy tells us that before escaping the holy old man commits an a

bominable crime on an unfortunate feeble-minded young girl, whose father had brought her from a great distance in order that the monk might cure her. Why invent that? Tolstoy himself was certainly not capable of such a crime. Why blacken himself thus? It was necessary - undoubtedly necessary. Tolstoy was incapable of it, but Professor Viskovatov has told us many much more disgusting things about Dostoevsky - such logic does exist, although the manuals say nothing about it.

It may be that Tolstoy was not thinking of Dostoevsky when he wrote the ending of Father Sergius; but when his memory unfolded before him the long tale of his past days, he saw that the crime he had imagined would not burden his own soul. Perhaps this imaginary crime may even have eased him on the long road which some mysterious will forced him to travel; for have we not come into a region where the possibilities are quite different from any to which we are accustomed here?

Father Sergius has a conclusion. Tolstoy paid his tribute to classicism, he made a satisfactory ending. After leaving the monastery, and wandering far and long, Father Sergius arrived in Siberia: "He went to live with a rich peasant; and he is living there to this day. He works for the peasant, teaches the children, and tends the sick."

It is clear and simple - for those who do not want to see that it is just a tribute paid to classicism, and that Tolstoy has not yet traveled the whole of his painful way. Do not the terrors of which he told us exist in Siberia? Are the furies less pitiless there? Father Sergius is not the last of Tolstoy's works. Living with the rich peasant there, working in his garden, teaching the children, tending the sick, Tolstoy could no more find peace than when he was fighting for his mysterious truths in the midst of his own family. This is why he gives only three lines to this new life of Father Sergius. Obviously, they simply serve instead of a question mark or a full stop. Or else they are only the conventional tribute to reason which insists that everything which has a beginning must have an end. Tolstoy hardly ever dared openly to refuse obedience to reason; he never admitted that he lived in darkness and not in the light. And night was for him night, nothing but night, emptiness and void; and yet it was he who revealed to us things about the vox mystica which even the great saints had not seen, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, St. Theresa, or St. John of the Cross. Such is the fundamental contradiction of human nature; we want even our delirium to be subject to laws, and make the same demands of our revelations.

When "the light of truth" appeared to Descartes, he immediately imprisoned his discovery within a logical formula: "Cogito, ergo sum." And the great truth perished, it gave nothing either to Descartes or to any one else. Yet it was he himself who taught: "De omnibus dubitandum." But then he ought first of all to have questioned the legitimacy of the pretensions of syllogistical formulae, which claim to be the only, invariable, expert appraisers of truth and error. Directly Descartes began to make deductions he forgot what he had seen. He forgot the cogito, he forgot the sum, in order to be sure of the ergo which has the power to constrain men's minds. But all the intuition was in the sum, and the relation of the cogito to the sum, like that of the sum to the cogito, gives us nothing new. It would have been more accurate to say sum cogitans. That is the essence of all the new understanding.

A thing was suddenly revealed to Descartes of which he had been in ignorance; that he, Descartes, really existed. It was revealed to him; it was a revelation which was in direct contradiction to all the principles of reason. Reason, which questions everything, this pure, super-individual reason, this "consciousness as such", without which all objective knowledge is impossible, had begun to question the existence of Descartes. And where reason is doubted, rational arguments cannot convince.

When "the light of truth was revealed" to Descartes (as he himself describes his "cogito, ergo sum"), this was, I repeat, a true revelation which triumphantly dispersed all considerations of reason. If it had been a question of deductions and conclusions he might have remembered the words of Tertullian and said: "Cogito, sum; certum est quia impossibile" (I think, I exist; that is certain, because it is impossible). In other words: reason, which has bound us with chains of gold, will have to submit. There is something in life which is above reason. What reason cannot conceive is not therefore always impossible. And conversely, where reason establishes a necessity the chain may nevertheless break.

That is how Descartes should have interpreted his discovery. But he was aiming at "strict science" and was afraid of leaving the common world in which alone strict science is possible. He therefore interpreted it in exactly the opposite way: he did not break, but blessed the golden chains, or let us say rather the golden calf which the whole of humanity, and all living creatures, have worshipped since the beginning of time and throughout all their struggle for existence. For all that has life thinks only of advantage. Even animals have a soul, and a rational soul, from some points of view more rational than that of human beings, for it is more perfectly subject to reason's laws. If there are any creatures who live in harmony with nature, they are undoubtedly the animals. It is only in man, and very rarely in him, as a gift from heaven, that "free will" is made manifest, that free will which despises advantage, and which is also called rashness (tolma), impious audacity, for it destroys order, law (ordo, taksis, nomos) - which man in his blindness holds for eternal. But Descartes's "discovery" shows us how little the understanding of "laws" can give to us.

He did not know, he really did not know that he existed. And even today, even after his discovery, the wisest of men do not really know that they exist. Were not the Stoics right? Not so much in saying p§Ós aphr§æn mainetai (all who do not submit themselves to reason are mad) as in saying that in all humanity there were only three or four wise men whom they did not think mad. Of course, they exaggerated, and in any case did not know how to recognize the true wise men - Antisthenes himself did not know, certainly did not know the truth that Descartes saw: two thousand years had yet to elapse before that became known. And what use could he have made of that knowledge?

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Last Judgment

<< | >>

6

Cogito, sum; certum est quia impossibile. This was what Tolstoy really thought when he preached to men submission to reason. And he knew only too well that this theory of knowledge (for these few words contain a whole theory of knowledge) was a defiance of all traditional self-evident truths. More than a mere defiance; it was a complete, definite break with the traditions of the common world. This break once made, man has nothing left to say but what Tolstoy said in The Diary of a Madman: "They certified that I was sane; but I know that I am mad."

A madman's theory of knowledge! Is this not an absurdity? Can a madman have any knowledge whatever? Can he create a theory? Is it, in fact, possible to go on listening to Tolstoy after such confessions? These questions cannot be evaded.

Aristotle begins his Metaphysics thus: Pantes anthropoi to§í eidenai oregontai physei (it is in the nature of all men to aspire to knowledge). On the other hand, one of the most remarkable philosophers of the present day, Bergson, establishes his theory of knowledge on the following principle: "Originally, we think only in order to act. It is in the mould of action that our intelligence has been cast. Speculation is a luxury, whereas action is a necessity."

We are bound to adopt the second part of Bergson's statement: thought is, in fact, a luxury and action a necessity. I do not, however, think it would he true to conclude from this that men begin by acting and only think afterwards. For this involves the further implied assumption that men are first of all concerned with necessity and only think of luxury when they already possess all necessaries. But that is a gratuitous supposition, or rather, it springs from the observation of modern daily life with its varying preoccupations. Necessities are imposed by the particular, temporary, and changing conditions of human existence, but it is in the very nature of a living creature to aspire to luxury. And only when unable to achieve the higher aim does he force himself to be content with necessaries. Young animals play, and only those whom experience has ripened struggle for existence and are content with necessaries. Even men born in hardship and privation are not reconciled with necessity except with gnashing of teeth. We are naturally pleased to set up necessity and various "existence minima for our neighbours as a moral principle and a limit, otherwise it would be impossible to set a term to human appetite; but these are the commands which man imposes on nature and not nature on man.

Aristotle is nearer the truth than Bergson. To know, to think, cogitare (in the sense given to the word by Descartes), is a fundamental necessity to man, an essential of his existence. But it is true, and Bergson was so far right, that in the conditions of human existence, in the midst of the incessant struggle for daily bread, our thirst for knowledge is diverted and deformed. But this is the condition of sinful man, since the Fall. In paradise, where abundance reigned, it was not necessary to act. But those who were cast out of paradise found themselves faced with the dilemma: act or perish. God's curse weighed them down: In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat thy bread. But the remembrance of Paradise Lost still lives in us, and Aristotle's words, the testimony of a man two thousand three hundred years nearer to Adam, proves that he still remembered what we have now almost forgotten.

We in these days look upon Plato's anamnesis as unscientific, and prefer in this connection to talk of atavism. And yet I do not think that our contempt of Plato is justified. Plato himself, like all the Greeks, reverenced the wisdom of those who had lived before him. Hoi men palaioi, kreittones h§Üm§æn kai enguter§æ the§æn oiks, he said (the ancients, being wiser than ourselves, and dwelling nearer to the gods) [Phil. 16]. Plotinus thought the same, and wrote, palaioi kai makarioi philosophoi (the ancient and blessed philosophers). Thus we must not deny the anamnesis, and Bergson would have been nearer to the truth if, instead of "originally", which corresponds to the Greek physei - by their nature - he had said "usually". He would thus probably have expressed more adequately his own thought, which in more than one respect is very important and far-reaching.

Another question presents itself now. We see that reason cannot know truth, either "originally" as Bergson has it, or as I rather believe, because it has betrayed its nature and its origin and degenerated to such a point that it can only give us more or less useful statements which should help us in our struggle for existence. But what of philosophy? Philosophy does not pursue practical and useful ends. Neither is it satisfied with "minima of existence". It seeks, as Plotinus says, to timi§ætaton - what is most important and significant.

The ancients said that men should not only dz§Ün - live - but e§í dz§Ün - live worthily

. Philosophy aspires to the truth. And at the same time the only source of knowledge, as generally assumed, is reason. How get out of this predicament? Must we educate our reason again in the hope that it will return to that state which preceded the Fall, and of which legend has told us? But reason will not allow itself to be educated anew. And, moreover, who is there who could effect this regeneration? Reason itself?

Bergson, like others of the leading modern philosophers (Husserl in Germany), speaks of intuition. But Intuition is the daughter of Reason, flesh of her flesh, and we may be sure in advance that she has inherited all her mother s vices. So it is, too, with Bergson. He himself falls into the magic circle which he makes such strenuous efforts to avoid. In spite of every effort and precaution, Reason, according to her custom, continues to replace the truths which we are seeking by pragmatically useful and therefore generally convincing self-evident judgments. Intuition cannot in the long run reveal to us the inner life of man, which is particular and complex, capricious and chaotic, full of the unforeseen. The dynamic is just as mechanical as the static, and movement will no more discover the springs of life for us than immobility.

Bergson makes every effort to rid himself of the power of general ideas, but "reason", which cannot and will not give up its mission, turns his attention to "ourself", the human self in general, and transforms the consciousness of man, viz. that which is, on Bergson's own showing, unique, essentially not to be resolved, into a place of passage (lieu de passage) or temporary depository (d§Ûpositaire) of the §Ûlan vital (life force), i.e. into one of those general ideas which he himself has so eloquently condemned. And in Creative Evolution Bergson demonstrates by the use of arguments furnished by reason, that the idea of order is fundamental and chaos is contradictory. Thus reason is once more reinstated in all the sovereign rights which had been solemnly denied to it. Reason is declared infallible, just as by the extreme rationalist, Husserl: Roma locuta, causa finita.

This is not the place to examine Bergson's philosophy in further detail. I will only say - for it is right, and even necessary to say it here - that when I went abroad again after the war, and had the opportunity to study Bergson's works, I was profoundly moved. Philosophy is pursued by a fatal destiny; the same thing that happened to Descartes has happened to Bergson. The light of truth shone in his eyes; but he wanted to impart it to mankind, and immediately he was obliged to forget all that he had seen. Truth is not for common possession. It dissolves in smoke at the first attempt to draw an advantage from it, to receive it into the "common world". Bergson knew that too - he knows infinitely more than he tells us - and it is for this reason that he repeats with so much insistence that only great artists, free from the dominion of general ideas, are able to understand and to describe truthfully the inner life of man. But then it is among them and their works alone that philosophy must seek to discover what is "given directly"; it must overcome at all costs the temptation of the apparently convincing evidence of reasonable proofs. If the reflection which escapes him, as though by accident, in his first book, that the absence of all reason is in certain cases the best of all reasons - if this reflection had played the part in the development of his thought which is played by the idea of intuition, he would not perhaps have affirmed, in contradiction to the whole spirit of his philosophy, that "our ego is infallible in its immediate cognitions" (notre moi, infaillible dans ses constatations imm§Ûdiates); for "our" ego is something general, it is consciousness in general", the impotence of which (outside its own proper functions, limited as they are sub specie aeternitatis) Bergson himself has demonstrated with such noble courage, such pitiless force. He would rather have spoken of the One of Plotinus, to which he was so near, it seems to me, in his aspirations: perhaps he would not have been afraid to take Plato's anamnesis under his protection, or even Socrates' "daemon". He might then have remembered the katharsis (purification) which philosophy has banned, and the exercitia spiritualia. For after all, those ancients were our superiors, they lived nearer to the gods, although t

hey could neither fly through the air nor talk to each other across hundreds of miles of space.

But I repeat, to be able to do this, Bergson would have had to keep in mind the truth revealed to him; our logic, the logic of beings who eat their bread in the sweat of their brows, has fundamentally perverted our capacity to know by accustoming us to think in accordance with the exigencies of our earthly existence. Only he can know and think, who has nothing to do, who, thanks to a combination of circumstances essentially fortuitous, has been cast out from the world common to all, and, left alone, abandoned to his own devices, has suddenly discovered the truth which by its very nature cannot be necessary, obligatory, or universal. For this solitary man, "chance", so despised and rejected by science and by "our ego", becomes the principal object of his search. He resolves to perceive, to treasure, and even to express that revelation which hides behind the accidental, which is invisible to a reason busied over earthly affairs and subservient to the exigencies of social existence.

Such was Plotinus, the last great philosopher of antiquity. Such also was Tolstoy.

The characters of the posthumous works of Tolstoy which we have just been studying, still take a certain part in social life. They still preach, still struggle; they therefore act and retain a certain hope in Descartes's ergo, in Bergson's infallible general ego. But Ivan Ilych (in The Death of Ivan Ilych) and Brekhunov (in Master and Man) have neither the power nor the need to do anything at all. They are both slowly dying, and therefore ceasing to exist for the inhabitants of the common world. It would seem that in these circumstances there is nothing to be said about them. If Tolstoy had really been that faithful vassal of reason which he prided himself on being, he would not even have thought of writing a story on so unreasonable" a subject as death. A man dies, there is nothing to be done but bury him.

In the judgment of reason is it not, to put it mildly, idle curiosity to spy on what is happening in a soul in its agony?

But Tolstoy took no account of the pronouncements of reason. He knew how to make for his objective when he wanted to, without asking the permission of the authorities. When needful he was not even afraid to pass judgment on reason itself.

Both Ivan Ilych and Brekhunov are outside reason: they die in absolute solitude. Tolstoy cunningly cuts them off from all society, all action, all the sources from which we can generally draw strength to live.

"It was impossible even to deceive himself. Something terrible, novel, and so important that nothing of equal importance had ever happened before, was now taking place in Ivan Ilych. And he alone knew it. Those around him did not understand, and would not understand, they thought that everything was as it had been before. He had to live like this, on the edge of the abyss, absolutely alone, without a creature who could understand or have pity on him." It is not enough to say that no one wanted to understand him and pity him; for to them all, his kinsmen, his wife and his children, he became a grievous and repugnant burden. No one believed or wanted to believe that something so new and so important was happening to Ivan Ilych and that nothing like it had ever happened before, just as Nicolai Ivanovich's people did not believe him when he tried to tell them what he knew. Every one was deeply and sincerely convinced that Ivan Ilych, by his caprices, was unlawfully, even criminally disturbing the order of existence admitted by them all. They could neither go to the theatre nor arrange about the daughter's marriage, nor buy her clothes. They could "do" nothing. On the other hand, it was also impossible to stop the course of normal existence for the sole reason

that, from Ivan Ilych's own private and particular point of view, something extraordinary was happening to him, when it was something which, in everybody else's opinion, happens quite often, need surprise no one, and should not provoke any special anxiety or question.

The neighbours and friends of Ivan Ilych reasoned like Epictetus. When we learn of the death of someone who is a stranger and far away from us, we remain calm and say that what has happened was in accordance with the incontrovertible decrees of nature. Dear though Ivan Ilych may be to us, the existing order cannot and should not be upset on his behalf. This is an obvious truth which no sane man will deny. The relatives do all that they can to maintain the usual and decent order. They try to make the sick man as comfortable as possible, they call the most expensive doctors, give him his medicine at regular hours, think of little amusements for him. But all this, instead of calming Ivan Ilych, agitates and excites him more than ever. He sees in it the expression of the unshakable conviction that the existing order, as incarnate in his relatives, cannot and will not take any account of this new, extraordinary sensation. But it is not enough for the relatives and friends of Ivan Ilych to refuse to admit the peculiar importance of what is happening to him; in the name of reason, the depository of necessary truths, they demand that Ivan Ilych himself should not attach such importance to it, for there cannot be two truths, one for every one and the other for Ivan Ilych alone. It is this especially which provokes him to such transports of rage against every one round him, and finally creates a nightmare atmosphere which completely shuts him off from the outer world. He grossly, brutally, and motivelessly insults his wife, his children, his future son-in-law, and the doctors who are attending him. Ivan Ilych demands the impossible of them. He wants them to recognize that this new and extraordinary thing which is happening to him is the most important thing in the world, and that for its sake they should abandon and forget everything else, and join with him in a revolt against the existing world order. He persists in believing that if he is in the right, this "right" obliges every one to support him. To be in the right and not have this recognized, supported by any one, is of no use to him. Is that, indeed, being in the right at all?

But the relatives and friends cannot follow Ivan Ilych, nor even understand what is happening to him. They have neither the strength nor the inspiration necessary for that, any more than Ivan Ilych himself had before he fell ill. Normal man can only live if he walks in step with other men, and is sustained by cosmic and social order. Lonely, self-willed men provoke the indignation of their fellows and are regarded as criminals against God and society. Every one demands that Ivan Ilych should first submit himself and accept the inevitable. "He saw that the terrible and hideous act of dying was regarded by those around him as an accidental unpleasantness, rather out of place, and that it was judged by the standard of the same conventions which he himself had served all his life." The conventions. That is how Tolstoy designates everything that we are accustomed to call social and cosmic order, the world common to all waking men, to which Aristotle opposed the individual worlds of those who slept and dreamed. The dying man is also a dreamer, who is being torn against his will from the common world.

Tolstoy tells us Ivan Ilych's past life in detail. Not only has he never dared revolt against the laws of nature, he was even afraid to trouble the established order of man, to offend even against the conventions. He had a special instinct for finding out the well-trodden high roads, and himself and others regarded this tact as a special gift, for which he was esteemed and loved. It was with stupefaction, even with horror that he now looked back upon his past. His aptitude, his enthusiasm in submitting himself and others to a definite and unchanging order, now appeared to him not as a blessing but as a curse. He wants every one, absolutely every one, to see things from the same point of view as himself. It is his most deep-rooted conviction that only that is true which is universally admitted, that which every man can be obliged to recognize. He sees clearly that

his newly perceived truth awakens no sympathy in any one and will never be recognized by any one. For all except himself, it is "evident" that death is only an accident, that his account is closed, and that he will have to render up his "accidental" self and ensure the triumph of eternal, impersonal order and that reason which he himself, not so long ago, extolled as the only source of wisdom and justice.

Moreover at this very moment - and this is what makes the horror of his situation - he continues to believe within himself that it is not he but they who are right. This is precisely why he so passionately hates his surroundings; he feels that right and the might which protect right are not on his side but on the other. If it had been possible, he would most gladly have continued to sit in the law courts, to play whist, talk politics and so forth. And now he is cut off from all this. This same eternal order which had never ceased to sup port him from the time of his birth, and which he had always so faithfully served, had now turned against Ivan Ilych and did not seem in any way ashamed of this base treason, did not even think any explanation necessary by way of justification. "It was thus, and now it is otherwise." Prayers and entreaties make no difference. Ivan Ilych is excluded from the "common world" which he loved so much, and in which he had placed his whole trust. All efforts to return to the land of his fathers, to get back to the familiar hearth, are alike unavailing. Where he had felt himself to be a man in possession of his rights, he now sees himself reduced to the level of an "accident", deprived of all protection of the law. Now everything is banded together against him with the same implacable rigour that he used formerly to admire.

Ivan Ilych still refuses to believe that what has happened to him is final. It seems to him that it cannot be so, that he is dreaming, that he is going to wake up and find himself again in the old intelligible reality.

"He tried to re-establish the old train of his thoughts which the idea of death had shattered. But, strange to say, everything which used to drive away and dissipate the thought of death was now powerless to do so. Ivan Ilych now spent the greater part of his time in efforts to reawaken the feelings which had hidden death from him for so many years. Sometimes he said: 'I am going to think about the business of the law courts; used it not to fill my whole existence?' He went to the court, driving away all his doubts. He began to talk with his colleagues, he sat down, casting, from long habit, a pensive and absent glance over the crowd, grasping with his wasted hands the arms of his oak chair. From habit, too, he fingered the documents, leant over to a colleague and exchanged a whisper with him; then raising his eyes and straightening himself in his chair, he spoke a few words, and the business began. But suddenly the pain in his side seized him again, quite regardless of the suit which was proceeding, and he felt the sinking again. Ivan Ilych went on with his work, trying to divert his thoughts, but IT went on. IT rose up, planted itself before him and stared him in the face; and he stiffened in anguish and his eyes were dimmed. He asked himself then: 'Is death, then, the only truth?'"

Was death really the only truth, and were all the other sweet, calming truths good for nothing but to be destroyed or thrown out on the rubbish heap? Then on what could he lean? What could he do, what could he undertake? Must he give up all human rights, the rights of every reasonable being, and humbly and submissively cast himself into the black pit, as a hypnotized bird casts itself into the serpent's jaws? Reason, which had always rescued him from the most difficult situations, reason which "thinks in order to act", gathers together all its forces. But it can find nothing. "And the worst of it was that IT drew his attention, not in order that he might do something, but simply in order that he might contemplate IT, look IT right in the eyes, and suffer horribly without being able to do anything." And Tolstoy repeats further on: "He went into his study, lay down and was alone with IT. They were alone between four walls and he could do nothing wi

th IT, only look at it and shudder."

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Last Judgment

<< | >>

7

There was nothing to be done! Only to look this strange, mysterious reality straight in the eyes. It had come one knew not how or whence. And not only can no one help Ivan Ilych, no one can even listen to his complaints. It is in this absolute solitude, which could not have been more complete in the depths of the sea or in the bowels of the earth than in this great town, in the midst of his friends and family, and in the impossibility of "doing" anything at all, that lay the new, absurd, fantastic improbability which had revealed itself to Ivan Ilych. Not only men, but his faith and the principles which he had formed in the course of his long life, appeared to him false and unreal. But he no longer has any criterion by which he can distinguish reality from illusion, the waking from the dreaming state. He tries to recall the past, in the hope of finding some support there, but this past seems to be in league with his innumerable invisible enemies who want to deprive him of all support; the past refuses to come to his help. Once so peaceful, so gentle, so agreeable, it has now taken on the aspect of a terrible monster, which overwhelms him with reproaches and accusations.

"From the beginning of that existence which had for its last result the actual Ivan Ilych, all the joys which he had known now dissolved and melted away before his eyes, appearing mean and even vile... His marriage which had been so unexpectedly concluded, then his disappointment, the bad smell of his wife's breath, the sensuality, the hypocrisy, his dreary life in the courts, his preoccupation with money. So a year had gone by, two years, ten years, twenty years - and still he was the same. And as his existence flowed past, so it had become dry and withered. 'It was as though I were descending a mountain step by step, when I imagined myself to be climbing up it. And it is true that according to public opinion I was climbing just in exactly the same proportion in which I was losing all my living strength. And now it is all finished - die."

This is how a man thinks who can "do" nothing; the truths of the "common world", the laws of good and evil, of reality and illusion - all these truths are only diabolical witchcraft, even as the "common world" itself, in which these realities are adored.

The Death of Ivan Ilych is, it is true, only the history of a modest civil servant, and some might think that his thoughts are so painful and unhappy just because he was an ordinary, commonplace sort of man. But it is not a question of the commonplace quality of Ivan Ilych, but of the world in general, which not only he but all the greatest representatives of human thought look upon as the only reality. Father Sergius is a colossal figure, an ascetic saint, but Tolstoy condemned him to the same suffering which Ivan Ilych had to endure before he died. He knew the same solitude which could not have been more absolute even at the bottom of the sea; the same terrors, the same impossible situation without issue, the same inability to "do" anything at all for his own salvation.

Tolstoy was not at all addicted to the worship of great men. The two men, F

ather Sergius who has "done" so much, and Ivan Ilych the commonplace little official, are equally impotent when they arrive at the borders of earthly existence. In the face of this new reality, and in the thick darkness in which Tolstoy engulfs his heroes, the distinctions which are so apparent in the light of day become quite unnoticeable. And more, Tolstoy himself would not have been able to recognize by day all that had been revealed to him in the darkness. Did he not declare his antagonism to St. Paul and the doctrine of salvation by faith? We know how angry he was with Nietzsche for his formula "beyond good and evil", which had resuscitated the forgotten teaching of the old apostle. And, indeed, in the "world common to all" men cannot live by faith; in this world works are esteemed, and necessary; in it men are justified, not by faith, but by works. But Ivan Ilych will never return again into the "world common to all". And his thoughts, the thoughts of a man who only looks at IT but can "do" nothing, are quite different.

What is it? Why? This cannot be. Life could not be so purposeless and vile. And if it really had been so absurd and miserable, why die now, and die with all this suffering? Something is wrong here. Perhaps, he suddenly says to himself, perhaps I have not lived as I ought to have lived. But how can that be, when I have lived quite correctly? And he immediately repudiates this only possible solution to the riddle of life and death. Then what does he want now? To live? But to live how? To live as you used to when the ushers called out in court: "The court, gentlemen!" The court, he repeats. This is the verdict. But I am not guilty, he cries bitterly. Why then? He stopped weeping, and turning to the wall he began to ask himself again what he had done! Why this horror? But for all his efforts he could find no answer. And when, as often happened, he found himself saying that all this had occurred because he had not lived as he should, he immediately remembered the perfect regularity of his existence and put the terrible thought far from him.

The court! The court! Ivan Ilych had himself been a judge all his life. He knew that the object of justice was to separate the just from the unjust according to principles established once and for all, and to reward each according to his deserts. But this new, fantastic justice has nothing in common with earthly justice. It knows no rule, no law; for it there is no innocent man; all are guilty, and especially those who obeyed the laws and made a virtue of this voluntary submission.

This was more than Ivan Ilych could endure. His conscience as an old judge revolted against such a suggestion, for this new Last Judgment abolished all distinctions between good and evil. Not only Ivan Ilych, but all men are guilty. "It is impossible to fight against death. If you could only understand why this is so! But even that is impossible. It might be explicable if I had not lived as I ought; but really it is impossible to admit that," said he to himself, remembering how law-abiding his life had always been, how regular and respectable. "No, I could not admit that," he declared, smiling as though some one could have seen that smile and been deceived by it. "There is no explanation... suffering, death... why?"

Ivan Ilych is right to invoke the regularity of his existence; he is not alone; he is supported by the whole of the common existence to which he used to belong and which is maintained by this order and regularity. If a clever doctor had been able to cure him, he would have gone back to the court to defend once again the law and order which he had always served. I do not mean to say that Ivan Ilych's life had realized the maximum of human aspirations, but according to the Last Judgment, as revealed to Tolstoy (whether this was anamnesis or atavism I leave to the modern theories of knowledge to decide), our most admirable works can have no effect on the Invisible Judge. It appears, in fact, that we know nothing of what can move Him to pity, and we have every reason to believe that He is pitiless and inexorable in His decisions. "Why all these sufferings?" And the v

oice replied: 'For no reason at all.' And there was nothing else." If the severe accuser shows any signs of mercy, he always does so quite suddenly, from sheer caprice, without any motive at all. We must give up all legality, all regularity, all the supreme social and moral ideals, abandon them without question; they are left for moth and rust to corrupt.

But there are some things in Ivan Ilych's existence which can endure the test of eternity. In his youth he had known one or two really happy moments; if he could only recall these it might still be possible to live. When he was studying he had been happy too, he had known joy, friendship and hope. Then there were the early days of his apprenticeship with the governor; the love of a woman. But how unlike the good which Tolstoy has discovered is the good of the seekers after eternal salvation; how unlike it is, in fact, to any idea of good! But just for this reason, because it is not like "good", it may escape the judgment, may slip through the needle's eye, through which these camels, the legality and regularity admired of the common world, cannot pass. At the Last Judgment legality and regularity, like all the conventions, will be condemned as mortal sins. They will be condemned for their autonomy because, though created by man, they have had the impertinence to pretend to eternity. These essentially "ideal" conceptions, that have become the basis of our earthly existence, are what Ivan Ilych must now give up; death cuts all these threads which unite us to our fellows. The first condition, the beginning of the regeneration of the human soul, is solitude, a solitude which could not have been more complete in the bowels of the earth or in the depths of the sea, in which all legality, all reality, all the ideal substratum of everyday life will wither away. His honest, drab, mediocre civil-servant's existence will not save Ivan Ilych, any more than Father Sergius's virtuous and ascetic life can save him before the supreme tribunal. On the contrary, it is their virtues which make the situation of them both even more painful. They will both have to give up their merits and put all their trust, not in their past or future activity, but in that happy creative chance which common reason so scornfully rejects.

"It came into Ivan Ilych's mind that what he had hitherto looked upon as quite impossible might after all be true; that he had not lived as he should. It came to him that the timid efforts to fight against what the highest of men had looked upon as good (meaning by this not only his immediate superiors, but the wise men of the world), hardly perceptible efforts, which he himself had - as often as not repressed; it was these efforts which had been real while all the rest had been false. His occupations, his family and his interests, all that might have been false. He tried to defend all that to himself, and suddenly he understood the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend. 'If it is like this,' he said to himself, 'and if I leave living men with the consciousness of losing everything which has been given to me, and if there is no help for this, what then?' He stretched himself on his back and began to go over his life again from a new point of view. When next morning he saw his servant again, then his wife, his daughter and next the doctor, every one of their gestures, of their words, confirmed the hideous truth which he had seen in the night. In them he discovered himself, he saw what had made up his life, and he saw clearly that it was not at all what he wanted, it was a monstrous lie which hid both life and death from him. This vision augmented his physical sufferings tenfold. He groaned, he tossed to and fro and tore his clothes. It seemed to him that they were stifling him."

The description of the Last Judgment does not end even here. Ivan Ilych has given up a great deal, but not yet all. He has not given up the most important thing. His past existence still attracts him. Although he sees that return has been forbidden to him, that it is the end, really the end, although he is now convinced that his past life has been a continual lie, which hid the real truth, yet he is still afraid to give it up: the unknown future seems even more terrible than the past, which was bad indeed, but familiar to him. He persisted in admitt

ing, though with limitations, that his life had been good. And it was this justification of his existence which stopped him and prevented him from advancing, and chiefly tormented him. "Suddenly he felt as it were a shock in his chest, in his side, his breath was arrested, he was plunged into a black abyss, and there something lit up before him." This last leap into the unknown, this bold leap which Ivan Ilych had not dared to take by himself, was accomplished thanks to the action of an unknown force. It was not Ivan Ilych's merit, nor his will, it was not his clear-sighted reason which had torn him out of the world common to all, once so comfortable, so agreeable, and now so intolerable. Even as our passage from non-existence into being is accomplished without our participation and supposes the imperious, perhaps even violent, intervention of some mysterious fiat, so too the passage from life to death cannot be accomplished naturally; it is an inconceivable and therefore so frightful a fortuitous rupture of the established order of our existence. Solitude, complete obscurity, chaos, the impossibility of foretelling, and complete ignorance; can man accept all these? Can he still hope and go forward when he has seen with his own eyes what Ivan Ilych suffered?

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ I \ The Last Judgment

<< | >>

8

Eight years after The Death of Ivan Ilych, Tolstoy wrote Master and Man. These two stories are, in spite of their surface dissimilarity, so intimately connected with one another that they seem to be only variations on a single theme. Since Tolstoy had been forced out of the common way by the terrors which he had described to us in The Diary of a Madman, one single thought, one single problem pursued and obsessed him. If Plato is right in saying philosophers "concern themselves with nothing but dying and death" (ouden allo epit§Üdeuousin §Ü apothn§Üskein kai tethnanai) then we must admit that few of our contemporaries have so wholly devoted themselves to philosophy as Tolstoy. Tolstoy begins by describing to us, in these two stories, a man in the ordinary circumstances of existence, circumstances which are well known and universally admitted. Then suddenly, in Master and Man (the catastrophe is even less prepared than in The Death of Ivan Ilych), he transports his characters to that solitude which could not have been more complete in the bowels of the earth or in the depths of the sea. Vassili Andreivich Brekhunov is a "self - made man", a rich villager, of the corporation of merchants, proud of his intelligence and of the fortune which he has won. He owes nothing to any one but himself, to his own talents, his own energy, for everything that he possesses; and he is, moreover, convinced that he possesses a great many excellent things. He genuinely despises those who have not succeeded in carving out their own path through life; misfortune and incapacity are synonyms in his eyes. He would probably repeat with others: "Trust in God, but look out for yourself," but in his mouth these words would mean: "God's duty is to help those who do not sit with folded arms. If he had had a theological education he would have said: Facienti quod in se est Deus infallibiliter dat gratiam, and he would protest against those who affirm that Deum necessitare non posse. But he does not know Latin and expresses the same ideas in Russian with no less emphasis. The man worthy of the name is the one who has the means to make himself beloved of God by his own efforts. Masses, fat wax candles, and all the rest are not for a miserable moujik like the workman Nikita, who earns with difficulty a few kopeks to supply his immediate needs. But he, Vassili Andreivich, can do anything. By his own ene

rgy and intelligence he has assured his welfare here below and his eternal salvation above.

The consciousness of his righteousness, indeed of his election, never leaves him. He even cheats with conviction. Two days before the festival which marks the opening of the story, Marfa, the servant Nikita's wife, has come to Vassili Andreivich and has obtained from him white flour, tea, sugar, the eighth of a measure of brandy, three roubles' worth altogether, besides five roubles in money. She has thanked him for all this as though he had done her a special favour, although at the lowest computation he owed Nikita twenty roubles for his work. "'Are we agreed on our bargain?' Vassili Andreivich had said to Nikita: 'if you want anything you shall have it from me, and you shall pay me in labour. I am not like others where you must wait, make out bills and then pay fines into the bargain. No, I am a man of honour. You serve me and I will not desert you.' As he spoke thus Vassili Andreivich was quite sincerely convinced that he was Nikita's benefactor, so persuasive were his arguments and so wholeheartedly did all those who depended on him, beginning with Nikita himself, support him in the opinion that, far from exploiting other people, he was loading them with benefits."

Tolstoy insistently underlines this gift which Vassili Andreivich possessed of being able to convince himself and others of his rectitude. It was a precious gift. To it Vassili Andreivich owed the comfort of his position. A few pages later on Tolstoy quotes another example of his talents. He is trying to sell Nikita a worthless horse.

"'Well, take the bony horse; I won't charge you much for him,' cried Brekhunov, feeling agreeably excited and joyfully seizing the opportunity to drive a bargain, which he loved of all things. 'Give me fifteen roubles or so instead, it will buy one at the horse fair,' said Nikita, who knew quite well that the bony beast which Vassili Andreivich was trying to pass off on him was worth seven roubles at the outside, and that it would be reckoned against him at twenty-five. He would not see the colour of his money again for many a long day. 'It is a good horse. I want your good as well as my own. Word of honour! Brekhunov deceives no one. I would rather lose on the bargain myself. I am not like others. I give you my word that the horse is a good one,' he cried in the special tone which he used in order to talk over and deceive buyers or sellers."

Brekhunov, as we have seen from these extracts, was no ordinary man. Being a merchant, he could only make use of his great powers over himself and others for a modest end, bargaining. But if fate had seen fit to put him in a more exalted position, if he had had the necessary education, his voice, which was now only used to confuse his fellow merchants in their ideas, to deceive buyers and sellers, would certainly have been used for other purposes. Who knows to what he might not have persuaded the masses which he could then have addressed? The secret of talent lies in the ability to work upon men. Conversely, success, general approbation, is the atmosphere which talent needs for its development. Crowds need leaders, but leaders also need crowds.

Tolstoy knew this; the hero of his story was no ordinary character; he had a powerful will and a clear intelligence, in his own way he was a genius. Such is the personality which Tolstoy will now tear out of his natural setting and put abruptly into the midst of new conditions, facing him with the absolute solitude which we have already met in Ivan Ilych.

Nikita goes out with Brekhunov and together they are caught in a snowstorm. But Nikita's agony in the snow is of no interest either to Tolstoy or to us. Perhaps Brekhunov is right when he prepares to abandon his faithful servant and says: "It doesn't matter to him whether he dies or not. What was his life like? He won't regret his life. But I, thanks be to God, I still have something to live

for!" Nikita prepares to die as he has lived, peacefully, with that calm submission which, losing itself in the grey uniformity of the surrounding world and obeying eternal laws, makes no particular individual impression which can be seized and retained in the mind of the observer. Tolstoy himself cannot guess at what happens in Nikita's mind when life ceases and death begins in it under the snow which covers him. Perhaps this is why Nikita lives and Brekhunov dies. Tolstoy wanted to confront life with death; but a rich life, full to the brim, confident in itself and its sacred rights and without even a suspicion that an implacable enemy infinitely stronger than itself is watching it at every turn. Even when it turns out that master and man have lost their way and that they will have to pass the night buried under the snow, Brekhunov will not admit that his reason and his talents, which have already got him out of so many difficult situations, will betray him now; that in a few hours his stiffened hands will let fall the potestas clavium, which gave him the proud right to look upon the future with the same confidence as the present.

This is what he is thinking of while Nikita, in his thin clothes, drowses under the falling snow and tries to protect his shivering body against the raging of the bitter wind. Brekhunov is warmly clad, as yet he does not feel the cold, and from past experience is confident he never will.

"What did we possess in my father's time? Nothing much; he was no more than a rich peasant. An inn, a farm; that was all. And I, what have I collected in fifteen years? A shop, two inns, a mill, barns for grain, two farm properties, a house and its outbuildings all under iron roofs.' He thought of all that with pride. 'It is quite different from my father's time. Who is now famous throughout the whole district? Brekhunov! And why? Because I never lose sight of business. I work. I am not like others who are always sleeping or else running their heads into some foolishness or other.'"

Brekhunov continues for a long time to sing the praises of these reasonable, active principles, the source of all "good" on earth. And I repeat: if Brekhunov had received a superior education, he would have been capable of writing an excellent philosophical or theological treatise, which would have made him famous, not only in his own district but throughout all Russia and Europe.

But here we come to the second part of the story, where an unexpected reality suddenly supervenes and affords the critique of this treatise which Brekhunov might have written.

In the middle of this reasoning Brekhunov began to doze. "But he suddenly felt a shock and awoke. Whether it was that the horse had tugged at a few straws from behind his head, or whether it was the effect of some internal uneasiness, he suddenly awoke and his heart began to beat so violently and quickly that it seemed as though the whole sledge were trembling beneath him." This was the beginning of a whole series of events of which Brekhunov had no suspicion in spite of his long life, his powerful intelligence, and his rich experience. Around him was the boundless plain, boundless, at least, to him, and snow, cold, and wind, Nikita, already numbed by the cold, and the shivering horse. He felt unreasonable but insistent and overmastering terror. "What to do? What to do ?" This is the regular question which every man asks when he finds himself in a difficult situation. It presents itself to Brekhunov, but this time it seems completely absurd. Hitherto, the question had always held the elements of its own answer, it had at least always shown him the possibility of an answer. But this time it held nothing of the sort. The question excluded all possibility of an answer; there was nothing to be done.

Brekhunov was no coward. He had been in many difficult places in his lifetime, and had always been ready to fight any adversary, even one stronger than himself. But his present situation was such that it would have been impossible to i

magine anything more terrible. The enemy was formidable and - this was the worst part of it - completely invisible. Against what could he direct his blows? Against whom could he defend himself? Brekhunov's reason could not admit that such a thing was possible.

When they had stopped at Grichkino, an hour earlier, everything had seemed so comfortable, so natural, so easy to understand. One was able to talk, to listen to other people, drink tea, give orders to Nikita, drive the bay. And now there was nothing to be done but to look on and feel oneself freeze. Where is truth, where is reality? Over there at Grichkino, or here on this plain? Grichkino had ceased to exist for ever; must one then doubt the reality of its existence? And with it the reality of the existence of all the old world? Doubt everything? De omnibus dubitandum? But did great Descartes really doubt everything? No, Hume was right: the man who has once doubted all things will never overcome his doubts, he will leave for ever the world common to us all and take refuge in his own particular world. De omnibus dubitandum is useless; it is worse than storm and snow, worse than the fact that Nikita is freezing and that the bay is shivering in the icy wind.

Always so strong, so clear-minded, Brekhunov tries, for the first time in his life, to take refuge in dreams. "He began once more to reckon up his profits, the sums which were due to him. He began to boast to himself again, and to take pleasure in his excellent situation; but at every moment fear slipped into his thoughts and interrupted their pleasant flow. Try as he might to think of nothing but his accounts, his transactions, his revenues, his glory and his wealth, fear little by little took possession of his whole soul."

It will seem strange that Brekhunov, like King Solomon in Ecclesiastes, told over the tale of his riches and his glory. But this was just what Tolstoy wanted, and he knew what he wanted. If the great king himself had been in Brekhunov's place, the situation would not have been changed in any way. Riches and glory added nothing to Brekhunov's strength, nor diminished in any way that of his invisible adversary. For the lowly and humble Nikita it was much easier. "He did not know whether he was dying or whether he was falling asleep, but he was equally ready to do either."

All his existence, utterly devoid alike of glory and wealth, had accustomed Nikita to the thought that he was not his own master, that he must not ask any one to render him an account, or to explain what was happening. He had never understood anything, and he continued not to understand; there was not much difference. But for Brekhunov it was quite another matter. He was accustomed to being his own master, and to having clear and distinct explanations given him; everything indefinite and indeterminate was intolerable to him. To live in the unknown is to live under a strange power which slays or spares us as it will. Can one have confidence in it? Why should it have mercy on us? It will certainly condemn us. One cannot believe any one or anything, except oneself. And in any case, before believing one must ask cui est credendum - whom shall we believe? You must not be surprised that Brekhunov takes to talking Latin and quoting St. Augustine, for it was certainly no more surprising than everything else which was happening to him.

And Brekhunov, gathering together all his strength for the last time, firmly declared: "I will never believe in this silence, in this forsaken solitude, in the snowstorm, the shivering horse, freezing Nikita, this cold and dreary desert, and this infinite waste." Reason was still alive within him, and reason which had always taught him what to do would guide him again. There was still some possible answer, although a lying terror was whispering to him that he must yield.

Brekhunov decides to abandon Nikita and take his chance, mounts the horse and goes off in search of the road.

This was undoubtedly a reasonable decision; the only reasonable decision. Was he to die, caught by the cold, like a dog, he, Brekhunov, who for so many years had filled Russia and Europe with the fame of his inns, his house, his barns with their iron roofs?

Brekhunov makes a last, supreme effort to defeat his invisible foe. But what he does, what he is forced to do, in no way resembles what one would call "action". He urges on his horse, which obeys him docilely, but his strength of mind, in which he had always had so much confidence, now betrays him. Without noticing it, he continually changes the direction of his march. Everything overwhelms him, he is trembling more from fear than from cold now - a quite absurd and unreasonable fear of every tussock which appeared through the snow. To his distracted eyes every outlined object was as a phantom. He suddenly found himself placed in circumstances so contrary to his usual reasonable, positive nature, that everything appeared to him stupid and absurd as in a fairy tale. But where is truth? In that old world, with that old reason where everything is clear and comprehensible, or here? Until now there had been nothing hostile or terrible or mysterious in that tussock or in those dried grasses. They had been subject to man and useful to him. What then, is the force that suddenly takes possession of them? Why do they inspire him with such terror? And not they alone; this immense, mournful desert appears peopled with phantoms who until now, as he had positively known, did not exist and could not exist.

"Suddenly a terrible cry rang in his ears and everything trembled and moved beneath him. Vassili Andreivich clung to the neck of his horse, but the neck trembled and the cry rang out again, more terribly still. For a few minutes Vassili Andreivich could not take heart again, could not understand what had happened. But all that had happened was simply that the horse had neighed with all its powerful voice, either to give itself courage or else, perhaps, to call for help. 'Oh, curse you,' said Brekhunov, 'how you frightened me!' But even when he understood the real cause of his terrors, he did not succeed in overcoming them."

The last chance of safety disappeared, terror invaded his soul and took possession of it. Explanations which had formerly driven away all his doubts and fears were now powerless and brought him no comfort. "One must think, one must be calm," said Brekhunov to himself; but in vain. He had already crossed the fatal border line, he was cast off for ever from solid earth, where order reigns and laws and methods which have been securely established for the ascertaining of truth. The phantoms with which the desert is peopled will disappear no more, whether or no he succeeds in explaining that the dried grasses are nothing but a vegetable growth and the cry of terror no more than the neighing of his horse. And, moreover, are these descriptions accurate? Has that black bush not got some occult force which had escaped Brekhunov's sagacity until now?...

Brekhunov falls from his horse into a snowdrift, the horse goes on and leaves him alone, utterly alone in the snow. The forest, the farmsteads, the inns, the house under its iron roof and the barns... will his heir - 'what', he thinks, 'will become of these? But what is happening? This cannot be.' Suddenly he remembers the tuft of grass which the wind had shaken and which he had passed twice already. Such a terror invaded him then that he could not believe in the reality of all that was happening to him. He thought, 'Is not this a dream?' And tried to awake. But it was not a dream.

He tried to remember the theories of knowledge which even a few hours earlier had given him the power to distinguish between the real and the visionary, dreams from waking; but these principles, hitherto so clear and definite, had effaced themselves and could no longer guide him. They defined nothing, taught nothing, and could not deliver him. Then he gave up all scientific theories and remembered that he had one last resource left to which he had not resorted until now, havi

ng felt no need of it, and having kept it in reserve for a last emergency.

"Queen of Heaven, Holy Father Nicholas, Lord of Renunciation..." He thought of the Mass, of the icon with its dark face in the gilded frame, of the candles which he sold for this icon, the candles which were immediately brought back to him, hardly burnt at all, and which he hid in a drawer of his writing table. Then he began to pray to this same St. Nicholas that he would save him, and promised him a Mass and candles. But he immediately and very clearly understood that this face, those ornaments, the candles, the priest, the Mass might all be very important, very necessary even, over there in church, but that they could not help him in any way, that there had not been and was not any connection between the candles and the religious ceremonies, and his present situation."

But what does this new reality call to mind? Nothing that Brekhunov knows, except dreams. Brekhunov's powerful and well-balanced understanding can imagine nothing, it feels itself lost in the midst of the dreams which press in on reality, he struggles like a madman and does just the opposite of what could help him. "Only, no confusion! No haste!" lie repeats to himself these well-learned and tried rules of reasonable action and methodical search. But his terror grows, and instead of looking for the road, calmly and carefully, according to rule, he begins to run, falls, picks himself up again, falls once more and loses the last remnants of his strength. Thus he arrives, quite by accident, at the sledge where Nikita is lying. There, at first, from old habit, he makes proof of great activity. Then suddenly a complete change comes over him, such as could not have been deduced by any ordinary rules, from his empirical character.

Before Nikita, who, as it seems to him, is about to die, in the face of inevitable death, Brekhunov suddenly resolves to break completely with his past. Whence this decision comes, and what it means, Tolstoy does not explain; and presumably he does well, for the fact admits of no explanation; in other words, we can establish no connection between the force which drives a man towards the unknown, and the facts that we have previously known about him. This break means, in the words of Plato and Plotinus, "a flight from the known", and any explanation, in so far as it tries to re-establish broken ties, is only the expression of our wish to maintain the man in his former place, to prevent him from accomplishing his destiny.

"Vassili Andreivich," Tolstoy tells us, "stood for some moments in silence, and then, suddenly, with the same decision with which he used to clinch a successful bargain by a handshake, he took a step backwards, rolled up the sleeves of his coat and set about rubbing life back into Nikita's half frozen body." Can you explain this "sudden" and "suddenly" from which spring the decisions of those who are forsaking the common world? Brekhunov suddenly descends from the height of his glories to warm that worthless peasant Nikita. Is it not an obvious absurdity? But it is still to a certain extent the old Brekhunov; one feels his need to do something, in order not to have to look IT in the face. In the words which he addresses to Nikita we still catch a ring of the old boasting tones, the old self-glorification. Brekhunov still tries instinctively in his old way to escape the inevitable. He is still afraid to let drop from his trembling hands the potestas clavium which obviously no longer belongs to him.

"Ah, there you are! You are all right!... And you talk of dying. Don't get up, keep warm. That's what we do, we cunning ones..." Vassili Andreivich begins to hold forth. But he could not go on in the same strain. And he was obliged to throw this act, too, overboard. "That's what we do..." - this phrase might have been of some use to him formerly, but now, after the decision of this autocratic "suddenly", it is of no use at all, even though crowned by supreme self-abnegation. Something else is wanted, something quite different.

"To his great astonishment he was unable to go on, for his eyes filled with

tears and his lower jaw began to tremble. He stopped talking and could only swallow the lump in his throat. 'I have been frightened,' he thought to himself,'and now I am very weak.' But this weakness was not unpleasant; it caused him a peculiar feeling of joy such as he had never previously known."

Brekhunov rejoiced in his weakness; the same Brekhunov who all his life had gloried in his strength, according to the laws of common humanity, persuaded that he was not and could not be happy except in his full strength; and in this conviction he had disputed the potestas clavium, the power to bind and loose, with Heaven itself. This joy which was born of weakness, was the beginning of the miraculous, inconceivable, enigmatic change which we call death. Brekhunov, Tolstoy tells us, tries once more to get back for a moment into the old world; he boasts to someone that he has saved Nikita, that he has sacrificed his life to him; but these abrupt stirrings of the old consciousness, the consciousness of strength, become shorter and shorter and eventually cease altogether. Then there remains in him only the joy of his weakness and his liberty. He no longer fears death; strength fears death, weakness does not know this fear. Weakness hears the appeal coming from the place where, long pursued and despised, she has found her eventual refuge. Brekhunov renounces, eagerly and with feverish haste, his inns, his barns, and all the great ideas, including the potestas clavium, which had gathered in his soul and been the boasts of the other, the learned, Brekhunov. And now an admirable mystery is revealed to him. "'I come, I come,' he cried joyfully with his whole being. And he felt that he was free and that nothing held him back any more." And he went, or rather he flew on the wings of his weakness, without knowing whither they would carry him; he rose into the eternal night, terrible and incomprehensible to mankind.

The end of Master and Man turned out to be a prophecy. Leo Nicolaevich Tolstoy also ended his days on the steppe, in the midst of storms and tempests. Thus destiny will end. The glory of Tolstoy was spread abroad throughout the whole world while he still lived. And yet, in spite of that, soon after his eightieth birthday, which was celebrated in the four quarters of the globe, in every language - an honour which no one before his day had enjoyed - he yet left all and fled from his home one dark night, not knowing whither or wherefore. His works, his glory, all these were a misery to him, a burden too heavy for him to bear. He seems, with trembling, impatient hand, to be tearing off the marks of the sage, the master, the honoured teacher. That he might present himself before the Supreme Judge with unweighted soul, he had to forget and renounce all his magnificent past.

Such, in fact, is the revelation of death. Down here on earth, all that was of importance, but here one wants something quite different. Pheug§æmen d§Ü phil§Ün eis patrida... Patris de §Üm§àn hothen par§Ülthomen kai pat§Ür eke§à (Let us flee to our dear fatherl for thence are we come, and there dwells our Father.) (Plotinus, Enn. I, vi, 8.)

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances

<< | >>

Part II

REVOLT AND SUBMISSION

"I think the world's asleep."

- SHAKESPEARE, King Lear, Act I, sc. iv.

Panta gar tolm§Üteon, ti ei epicheir§Üsaimen avaischynte§àn;For all things are to be dared; what if we essayed to cast modesty aside?

- PLATO, Theaetetus, 169 D.

1 - MORITURI

When one seeks to contemplate all that happens around one, what is now, what was long ago, what is near and what far; when one remembers that thousands, millions, billions of years passed before one came to the world and that billions of years will pass again after one is gone from it; that there is a countless multitude of worlds and that besides the thousands of millions of feeling and thinking creatures which live and have lived on the earth there are somewhere else other creatures, unknown to us, living, suffering, and struggling; when all this passes before one's eyes one thinks instantly that one has received a new vision which has no relation whatever to common apperceptions. One moment - and the vision is gone, we have neither the strength nor the opportunity to recall it and hold it fast, and we are left with nothing but a consciousness that everything that was and is taught us is not the reality. It is only there for the needs of the day. The reality lies far away, before us, behind us. There is only one way to it and each of us will have to tread that way.

2 - REVELATION

"The fool said in his heart: There is no God." Sometimes this is a sign of the end and of death. Sometimes of the beginning and of life. As soon as man feels that God is not, he suddenly comprehends the frightful horror and the wild folly of human temporal existence, and when he has comprehended this he awakes, perhaps not to the ultimate knowledge, but to the penultimate. Was it not so with Nietzsche, Spinoza, Pascal, Luther, Augustine, even with St. Paul?

3 - LIMITS

There are high mountains on the earth. But there are no very high mountains. There are mountains as high as 25,000 feet, but peaks rising to 30,000 or 35,000 feet are not found. There are great men, too, on the earth. But a limit has been set to their growth too; not over 25,000 feet. Is this an accidental limit, a limit which can be explained naturally, or is somebody, somebody's will, dictating these limits to human existence, and is that someone determined to allow no men On earth who are too great? And further: is this question permissible or is it too simple for modern consciousness?

4 - PHILOSOPHIC CRITERIA

Voltaire said that all kinds of literature are good, except the dull. Is he right? Certainly he is right; incontestably. To say that a literary work is dull is to admit that it is worthless. What, then, of philosophies of life? Have we the right to reject a philosophical system put before us simply because it is dull? I think we have. It is impossible that dullness should be the essence of life! Or that truth should be dull! That is self-evident. But why do not the philosophers use this proof in their disputations, besides other unanswerable arguments? Particularly since Kant, now that hypotheses which are considered indispensable f

or the attainment of certain ends are described as a priori truths. Even before Kant every one thought so but did not realize it. Obviously they forgot it. Well, I have recalled it, and now I shall wait to be thanked for a quite new, self-evident truth; and particularly for the deductions to which it will lead, which will prove quite unexpected.

5 - SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY

For a sick man we call the doctor, for a dying man the priest. The doctor endeavours to preserve man for mortal existence, the priest gives him the viaticum for eternal life. And as the doctor's business has nothing in common with the priest's, so there is nothing in common between philosophy and science. They do not help one another, they do not complement one another, as is usually assumed - they fight against one another. And the enmity is the more violent because it generally has to be hidden under the mask of love and trust.

6 - THE LAST JUDGMENT

Kant postulated God, the immortality of the soul, the freedom of the will. Kant's "practical reason" was obviously firmly bound up with the interests of our mortal, transitory existence. And here in the ebb-tide of time, one can perhaps still, at a pinch, make these postulates serve. Most men get along without any postulates at all, they live at haphazard, quite absorbed in the cares and joys of the day. But when the "dies irae, dies illa" draws near, joys and postulates lose their power and their magic. Man sees that it is quite irrelevant whether he postulated or not, whether he believed or not. The Last Judgment, which so tortured the Middle Ages and which our day has forgotten so absolutely, is no mere invention of selfish and uneducated monks. The Last Judgment is the supreme reality. In moments - their rare moments - of illumination even our positive thinkers feel this. The Last Judgment decides whether there shall be freedom of will, immortality of the soul, or not - whether there shall be a soul, or not. And, maybe, even the existence of God is still undecided. Even God waits, like every living human soul, on the Last Judgment. A great battle is going on, a battle between life and death, between real and ideal, and we men do not even guess what is happening in the universe, and are deeply convinced that we need not know, as though it did not matter to us! We think that the important thing is that we should arrange our lives as well and as comfortably as possible, and that the principal use of philosophy itself, as of all human creations, is to help us attain a placid and carefree existence.

7 - MASKS OF BEING

The continuity and the imperceptible gradualness of the changes which take place in the world is the objective reason of our ignorance and superficiality, and man's ability to grow accustomed to anything is the subjective reason. The lifeless continuity hides beneath it the violence and spontaneous suddenness of creative growth and action. Custom, however, kills curiosity. If an Eskimo were suddenly transplanted to Paris he would think that he had fallen into a world of fairy-story. But he would, of course, soon grow accustomed to it - and believe the Europeans when they told him that all fairy stories were only empty invention.

8 - OVERHEARD

"I sought to say to the mountain: Slide into the sea. It did not move from its place. I sought to conjure the whole material world: Dissolve! It did not dissolve. And consequently? There is no'consequently'! And I know something besides. I sought to conjure away the empty, patently senseless and quite unfounded superstitions which had been instilled into me from my childhood, God knows how - and there, too, I failed. They are not less immovable than mountains, rivers, and seas! Talk not to me of your'consequently' and your human experience! Anyhow, it is

not worth while sacrificing oneself without purpose. Apart from anything else, we are neither able nor willing to break the charm, to free ourselves from the devilish might or imagined reality. Even the events of recent times - shattering enough to awaken even the dead - have no effect on any one. Men wait patiently for things to return to their old condition and let us live our agreeable and carefree lives again. How long must man be scourged still?"

9 - COMMENTARY ON "OVERHEARD"

A famous letter written by Tolstoy to his wife from Arzamass. Tolstoy suddenly felt himself in the grip of intolerable, torturing, and unfounded fears. He felt that something imperious, hard, merciless, was rending him away from all that was dear, homely, near - from wife, child, artistic creation, from his property at Yasnaia Poliana, from life itself. And it was so clear, so distinct to him that these groundless, torturing fears were an evil before which he must flee, while the earlier world from which he was being rent by fears was a good which he must strive to attain... Ten, twenty years went by. Looking back on his past, Tolstoy sees just as clearly, and distinctly that the unfounded fears were a good, and that his wife, his children, his books and his property were the greatest of evils. There you have experience pitted against experience, self-evidence against self-evidence. Which is one to believe? Is it necessary to believe finally in anything? Is it possible to believe?... He who wishes to believe is seeking on this earth to attain to the beatitude and spiritual ataraxia promised us by the schools of philosophy and the teachers of religion. He wants to "pocket his wages" here and now. There is nothing impossible in this. We know from history that many, very many men have pocketed their wages in this life and thereby awakened the envy and jealousy of their less fortunate neighbours. They have, as a Russian proverb says, exchanged the crane in the sky - or said, by a rumour which we cannot check, to be there - for the tit in the hand, for beatitude and spiritual ataraxia in this life. Perhaps one day, like Tolstoy, they will reach the conviction that they should not have accepted the tit in the hand, for the tit means the loss of the crane in the sky. Or perhaps not. They will die with the tit in the hand and will never behold the crane - for this is the eternal law of destiny: the wages are not given twice and they have sold their birthright before death for a tit. These considerations have clearly never occurred to that philosophy which pursues positive ends. It thinks it quite obvious that groundless fears are an evil and sure possession a good. But what shall we say of Tolstoy's "experience" and other similar "experiences"? By what a priori is one to guard oneself from them?

10 - TODAY AND TOMORROW

It is hard for man to wait. He is so made that the present always seems to him more important and less dubious than the future. In a year's time - who knows what will be then? But now one must eat, drink, sleep, and have that spiritual peace without which one cannot swallow one mouthful or take one hour of sleep. Yes, but the future is the same as the present! Even the past is in many respects present. Past wrongs burn even as present: sometimes childhood memories poison our lives no less than events of today. As for the future - it will be on us before we are prepared for it! But warnings are useless. Despite his reason man is a being subject to the power of the moment. And even when he seeks to consider all things sub specie aeternitatis, his philosophy is usually sub specie temporis - indeed, of the present hour. This is why men reckon so little with death, as though death did not exist. When a man thinks on his dying hour - how do his standards and values change! But death lies in the future, which will not be - so every one feels. And there are many similar things of which one has to remind not only the common herd but also the philosophers who know so much that is superfluous and have forgotten, or have never known, what is most important. And it is when one reminds them of these things that one appears most unintelligible and even paradoxical.

11 - THE IDEAL AND THE MATERIAL

What is the basis of our world? "Matter," says Appearance. And those who desire to escape the power of Appearance are for ever at conflict with the materialists. In general they fight successfully; materialism has been utterly defeated, and ranks as the philosophy of the stupid and the commonplace. But although materialism is defeated, the outer world still dominates mankind. Man still perishes if shelter and nourishment fail him, the cup of hemlock is still mightier than the voice of wisdom, the rough soldier still destroys Archimedes and his drawings together. Even the blind, one would think, must arrive at the conviction that matter and materialism are not the crucial issue. The most deadly enemy of the spirit everywhere is not inert matter, which in fact, as the ancients taught, and as men teach today, exists either not at all or only potentially as something illusory, pitiable, powerless, suppliant to all - the most deadly and pitiless enemies are ideas. Ideas, and ideas alone, are that with which every man must do battle who would overcome the falsehood of the world. Matter is the most obedient of creatures. It is not only wax that can be moulded into any figure at will; Parian marble itself yields, and the formless block turns under the chisel of a Phidias or some other master into a singing god. From steel, too, we mould what we will, make monuments out of bronze, etc. Recently matter has renounced its immemorial right to be heavier than air, and floats with man across the sky.

Not so ideas. They do not yield, they do not permit man to evade their power. Let man but try to say to time: "Stand still!" Let him but try to make what is done undone, to beg for even a single violation of the laws of causality - beg, let us say, that a coconut palm grow out of a grain of wheat! Or that ugly Thersites turn into handsome Achilles! Any one will tell him that it is no use trying, nothing would come of it. But if this is so, then why do battle with "inert" matter and rejoice over ideas, which for all their "transparence" are far harder, coarser, more inert than the most lifeless matter?

We should be told: "What then is left for philosophy to do? To make the best of a bad job?" Yes, so it is. Philosophers justify the eternal and immutable ideal order, they chant psalms and hymns in its praise and hold this to be their function and their destiny. The theory of knowledge is a justification and exaltation of knowledge, ethics is the justification of the good, etc. Everything is justified ad majorem gloriam of the chance order and the chance structure of ideas... If only they would, at least, draw the last conclusions! If they would, at least, chant their psalms and hymns in praise of chance! Chance is just that which is so today, otherwise tomorrow. And if the order, the system of laws or ideas which rule the world is a chance one, one may hope that it may be replaced by something different - if not by absolute chaos, in which anything is equally possible, yet at least by a different order from the present. And even that would be no small matter. Perhaps an order will come to pass in which wisdom and virtue will prove stronger than the heretic's stake and hemlock cup, and perhaps the power of this order will extend, not only to the future, but to the past also, so that it will come to be that Giordano Bruno destroyed the stake, that Socrates triumphed over Meletus and Anytus, etc. So long as ideas are "idealized," so long, that is, as they are hymned and glorified, this cannot be the case. Consequently they must all be brought down from heaven and a place given them on earth, and not in a temple, but in a back courtyard. And then it would do no harm if matter were to climb up into heaven for a while, and have its fling there. Then it might turn out that the ideas, unable to put up with their disreputable neighbours, might themselves run off in all directions. We must try everything, and least of all must we trust ideas, especially not the eternal and immutable ones.

12 - SCHOOL OF HUMILITY

It is very good for every one, especially for the self-assured, to study the wor

ks of the great philosophers. Or, more accurately, it would be good, if men understood how to read books. Any "great philosophic system", if considered long and attentively, can lead us to realization of our insignificance. There are so many questions asked, and always on such important, necessary, and essential points - and there is not one single answer that is even partially satisfactory. Besides this, at every step there are countless contradictions, and rigidity, inability to forsake a standpoint once taken up. And this is so with great thinkers, even with the greatest. What, then, is man, and can his reason be called perfect, divine? Would it not be more correct to suppose that our reason is only an embryo, a germ of something, and that it has been granted to us only to strive, only to begin, but not to reach an end? That it is not matter, as the ancients taught, but rather the soul that exists only potentially: potentia but not actu; that each of us is only a "possibility" in the act of becoming reality, but not yet become it?

13 - THE SECRET OF EXISTENCE

Is it by chance that the ultimate truth is hidden from man - or should we perceive intention in the mist in which nature has veiled its tasks? We incline to the former assumption - or perhaps one should put it more strongly: we are convinced that the former assumption alone could be entertained by an educated man. Yet still the truth slips from our hands, ever and again, like the magic treasure in the fairy tales. Each time we think that only a little effort more will put us in possession of the truth, but each new effort leads to nothing, even as its predecessors did. Yes, truth is like a fairy treasure. It beckons, it calls, but ever and again it slips from our hands. And then comes that peculiar, specific fear which man feels when faced with the possibility of something new, something which has not yet happened, not yet been experienced. It is clear that Truth - I speak of course, of ultimate Truth - is a kind of living entity, which does not stand before us uninterested and indifferent, waiting passively till we approach and take her. We excite ourselves, we torture ourselves, we aspire passionately towards Truth, but Truth requires something of us also. She, too, is clearly watching over us, keen-eyed, and seeks us, even as we her. Perhaps she, too, waits for us and fears us. And if she has not yet thrown from her her secret veil, this is not out of forgetfulness, not out of distraction, still less is it "just so", without any reason, "by chance". Every seeker must bear this in mind - else in his seeking he will never reach beyond the limits of positive knowledge.

14 - DEATH AND SLEEP

We are wont to think that death is a kind of sleep, a sleep without dream-faces and without waking, the most perfect and final sleep, so to speak. It does in fact look as though death were the last sleep. Even Socrates, the wisest of men, thought so - at least he said so, if we are to believe Plato's Apology. But even the wise err: in its essence death is clearly the exact antithesis of sleep. Not for nothing do men sink so quietly, even so gladly into sleep, while feeling such ghastly fear at the approach of death. Not only is sleep still life: our life itself, strange as it may seem at first sight, is three-quarters or more sleep, i.e. the continuation of the original non-being out of which we were torn by some incomprehensible and mysterious power, unasked, and perhaps even against our will. All of us continue, more or less, to sleep in life, we are all sleep-walkers, moving automatically in space, spell-bound by the non-being which lies still such a little way behind us. It is precisely for that reason that the mechanist theories seem to us the only true ones, and any attempt to fight against immemorial necessity seems foredoomed to failure: it troubles our waking sleep and arouses only a sense of injury and irritation, such as a sleeper always shows towards a man who awakens him. Whenever anything unexpected, inexplicable, either from without or within shakes us out of our accustomed cherished equilibrium, our whole being is filled with unrest. The unexpected - also termed the inexplicable - is unnatural, against nature, it is that which ought not to be, that which is

not. We must at all costs show ourselves and others that there is not and cannot be anything unexpected in the world; that the unexpected is only a misunderstanding, something chance, something transitory, which can be removed by an effort of the reason. Humanity's supreme triumph was the discovery that the heavenly bodies themselves are of the same composition as the terrestrial, that heaven itself contains nothing new, inexplicable. The great charm for humanity of the theory of evolution lies in its exclusion of the possibility of anything new, anything previously non-existent, either in the most distant past or in the most distant future. A million, a billion, a trillion years ago, and also a million, a billion, a trillion years hence, life was and will be, broadly, like it is now, both on our planet and on all the innumerable planets, within our vision's reach or beyond it, of the infinitely vast universe. Man slept, he sleeps, and he will sleep in accordance with immutable, automatically conditioned laws of eternal nature - which are nothing else but eternal reason, or the eternal ideal fundamental principles.

No one ever troubles to think that these millions and billions of years, eternal nature, the eternal ideal principles, are just a vast nonsense which only does not amaze us because we have got accustomed to it. Incidentally, such senseless conceptions, which restrict thought and paralyze any desire for knowledge, are the whole basis of the theory of evolution, which has acquired such undivided sway over contemporary thought. Spectral analysis has conquered space and brought heaven down to earth, the theory of evolution has conquered time by reducing the whole of the past and the future to the present. This is the supreme achievement of modern knowledge, which proudly boasts its perfection!

But one must be sunk, indeed, in the deepest sleep to achieve such senseless and dull self-assurance! In this connection, the new, or rather, the newest philosophy has really said a "word of its own" - so unlike the words of the ancients. Even positivist Aristotle guessed at a divine quintaessentia in the universe, something super-terrestrial, with no resemblance at all to terrestrial things. Socrates did, indeed, say to his judges that death was perhaps only a sleep without dream faces. But it looks as though Socrates did not utter his real thought before the judges. For him they were the masses, the "many", who would have been incapable of grasping the truth and awaking out of sleep whatever one might say to them. Besides, he himself in the same Apology declared at the end of his speech that no one except God knows what awaits us after death. And this second assertion was presumably very much closer to Socrates' soul. Socrates - as the whole story shows - already undertook the "flight from life", already knew and taught to Plato that philosophy is nothing else than a preparation for death and dying. And the whole philosophy of antiquity, except the schools which built on Aristotle's foundations, took this thought - if one can speak here of a "thought" - for its starting-point. Not only Plato's direct disciples, but also the Cynics and Stoics, not to speak of Plotinus, were endeavouring to escape from the hypnotic power of reality, of the dream reality with all its ideas and truths. Remember Plato's cave, the saying of the Stoics that all men are mad, the frantic ecstasy of Plotinus! It is not for nothing that modern historians talk of the "practical" trend of ancient philosophy. Certainly, if the centrifugal forces which the ancient Greeks discovered in themselves show practical purposes, the historians are right. But they are wrong, when one considers that practical purposes, if one is to speak of them, must and can, obviously, be seen in the centripetal tendencies of modern philosophy. The ancients, to awake from life, turned to death. The moderns flee from death in order not to awake, and take pains not even to think of it. Which are the more "practical"? Those who compare earthly life to sleep and wait for the miracle of the awakening, or those who see in death a sleep without dream-faces, the perfect sleep, and while away their time with "reasonable" and "natural" explanations? That is the basic question of philosophy, and he who evades it evades philosophy itself.

15 - INTERPRETATION AND REALITY

Pleasure and pain are usually interpreted as reactions of the whole organism or of one of its parts to external stimuli. If the external stimulus threatens a danger we feel pain, if it is useful to the organism, pleasure. It is assumed that the preservation of the organism is the purpose, the only purpose, which Nature set herself when she created it. Such an explanation already entails the whole odious anthropomorphism so scrupulously shunned by science. To ascribe a purpose, even the most modest, the most unimportant, to Nature, is to equate her activity with that of a human being. At bottom it is indifferent whether one assumes that Nature's aim is to preserve the organism or to create a saintly, virtuous, human being. Even to say that Nature does not protect the individual organism, but only the species and variety, does not evade the reproach of anthropomorphism with all the blame attached to it. If we seriously wish to attain objectivity, we must not endow Nature with any of those qualities peculiar to the thinking, purposeful man. Nature is one thing, man another.

To speak of a Demiurge, a Creator, an Artificer of the world, is an obvious lapse from the scientific standpoint and a return to mythology. What could be more unnatural than a Nature anxious for something? Anxiety is the most characteristic quality of the higher animals, especially of man. The usual interpretations of pain and pleasure are thus only a superficial lip-service to objectivity and science, and a very crude one at that. Even if Nature was anxious for anything, it would certainly not be to help the organism in its fight for existence, the more so as that "existence" could have been protected in other and much simpler ways. In any case there was no sort of necessity to invent, for the purpose of securing it, such unusual things as pleasure and pain, which are utterly incompatible with objectivity, and may even be termed completely anti-natural. We may wonder as we will over the complexity and elaboration of the structure of an animal organism, but the capacity of feeling pain and pleasure deserves much greater astonishment than the most complex living machine. If, therefore, the question of means and ends is raised at all, it is obviously much more probable that the organism was created in order that the living being should feel pain and pleasure, or, in other words, should begin to live, than that life should have been created in order that the "organism", which is something material, in itself soulless, and, for all its complexity, yet elementary, should not be exposed so quickly to dissolution. And why should Nature be really so anxious for the preservation of the organism? What advantage has it over a crystal or any other inorganic body? That of complexity and elaboration? But here again, it is we, mankind, the reasonable animals, who worship and treasure complexity; for Nature complexity is by no means such a valuable quality.

Indeed, does Nature care about values at all? Esteeming, loving, hating, troubling, rejoicing, are not her concern, but humanity's. And then, if one may judge from the degree of protection afforded, inanimate things seem to enjoy every advantage. A block of granite, which, God knows, is inanimate enough, is far better protected than any organism. It fears nothing, and will endure for hundreds and even thousands of years. Thus, if Nature was really anxious to protect her creations, the simplest thing for her would be, when engaged in creation, not to exceed the bounds of the inorganic world. But clearly Nature has disregarded the limitations imposed on her by our ideas of objective cognition and set herself very much more ambitious aims. She is obviously by no means so limited in her tasks as she would have to be to entitle us to forget the metaphysical and theological periods of thought. There is nothing improbable in Nature setting herself "reasonable tasks". Obviously she can have purposes into which we have not been initiated and to which we shall never penetrate, since, for reasons at which we also cannot guess, she does not find it necessary to share with us her thoughts and conjectures. But even if we became convinced that Nature was intentionally concealing her purposes from us, our endeavour to reduce everything to a "natural" concatenation of cause and effect would still be unjustified.

On the contrary: if Nature is intentionally hiding anything from us, then we must abandon any thought of "naturalness". In that case pain and pleasure cannot be considered as something self-evident, as natural functions of the organism. One must - I repeat and insist on this - see in them the beginning of something completely and absolutely different from the organism and from any functions. They are an end in themselves, not the only and, of course, not the final end, but yet the purpose of Nature's creative activity. It is in order that there should be pain and pleasure that Nature has invented a countless multitude of wonderful masterpieces called organisms. Pain and pleasure testify to a certain entity sui generis par excellence. And now further: Contrary to appearance, or rather, in spite of what our familiarity with "natural explanations" offers us as appearance and self-evidence, pain does not always, or even nearly always, give warning of a danger threatening man, as pleasure is no guarantee of the absence of danger. On the contrary, the greatest danger threatening the living creature with final destruction, both of his soul and of his body, is pleasure. This is why all deep philosophic systems have shown such antipathy and such mistrust towards hedonism and even utilitarianism. This is the meaning of asceticism, and also the meaning of the words of the Cynic Antisthenes - words which to this day have never been sufficiently appreciated: "I would rather lose my understanding than feel pleasure." This saying was reawakened to new life by St. Theresa in her words - "Pati, Domine, aut mori" (Suffer, Lord, or die).

For the vast majority of mankind pleasure is sleep, or in other words, death of the soul, its return to non-existence. Pain, suffering, is the beginning of awakening. A pleasurable, even, unperturbed existence kills in man all his humanity, leads him back to a vegetative existence, to the womb of that nothingness out of which he was brought in so inexplicable a fashion by some mysterious power. If the life of man passed easily and ended with an easy, pleasant death, he would truly be the most ephemeral of creatures. But if we cast our thoughts for a moment over the whole history of humanity; it will be impossible to name one single period which was not darkened by the grimmest misery. Whence comes this? Why, if Nature is so anxious for the preservation of her creations, has she done nothing to prevent the mass destruction of living creatures? Or does some external necessity place bounds to her anxiety? The ancients thought otherwise! Heraclitus declared that the wars which seem so terrible to mankind were agreeable to the gods. And he said, just like St. Paul, that the gods were preparing something for mankind of which he dared not even dream. It seems that in both cases the old sage, who heard the voices of the gods more plainly, knew more, much more than we. He had no fear of anthropomorphism, and he did not break, "on principle", with myths. And for that reason he could see and hear whatever was revealed to him and was not forced to hide away his knowledge, to distort and mutilate it as though it were stolen goods or contraband which he had to bring across the frontier, but might not show to any one.

Pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, hopes, fears, passions, expectation, devotion, anger, hatred, etc., everything which fills human souls and of which human speech can tell, even in approximations - these things are certainly not meant for the preservation or profit of the individual human organism, much less of the species or variety. They are the "purpose" of Nature, and if we wish to penetrate her intentions even in part, the last place where we should begin is by studying the life of the amoeba or the mollusc. We shall learn nothing by studying that; we are more likely to lose the ability of ever discovering anything about the wonders and secrets of the world structure. We must project our thought and feeling into the most intensive and complex seeking and struggling of the boldest and greatest representatives of humanity, of the saints, philosophers, artists, thinkers, prophets, and "conclude" and judge with them on the beginning and the end, on the first and the last things. The more closely and carefully we study with our modern methods the molluscs and the amoeba and the remains of fossil animals, the ichthyosaurus and the mastodon, the farther they will lead us away from our chief and most urgent task. It will seem to us, as it seems today to the whol

e of modern humanity, that at bottom there can be neither secrets nor miracles in life; that the ancient tales of wonders and secrets are all base-born, bastards of scanty experience and childish credulity; that the truths, the first and the last, will sooner or later be discovered by us and comprehended with the same clarity and distinctness with which we have already comprehended a countless number of middle truths; that the theological and metaphysical periods of history lie far behind us, and that we live under the star of positive science, whose dominion has no end and will have no end!

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio Index ToC

In Job's Balances \ Part II \ Revolt and Submission

<< | >>

16 - WHAT ARE QUESTIONS MADE OF?

We are told that it is natural for man to ask questions, and that the innermost essence of the soul expresses itself in the ability to ask questions and find answers. Animals ask few questions, plants and inanimate things none at all, but this is precisely why man is so audacious: because he is no animal, no plant, and no inanimate thing. And further, questions are not thought out; they arise in some fashion of themselves in natural wise: it is impossible for a reasonable creature not to ask. Let us assume this to be true. But then that means that a reasonable creature can be nothing else but limited. For he alone asks, who does not know and who lacks knowledge. "None of the gods", says Plato, "philosophizes and seeks to become wise." It is obvious that the reasonable creature's desire for knowledge is born of his limitations. Consequently reasonableness is itself limitation. Of course if one compares man with a plant or a stone, the natural conclusion will be that to be reasonable is the same thing as to be more highly perfected.

But who forces us to compare ourselves with stones? Why should we not follow the example of the ancients and direct our eyes to the gods? That is to say, why should we not add to all our questions one more: what are questions made of? For I hope that it is now clear that questions are made, and always by the same limited, intimidated, preoccupied human being and, of course, of the material which lies directly to its hand. These conditions also determine the result achieved. We have before us a stone, a plant, an animal, man.

Question: How did man become so reasonable, seeing that he is composed of the same material as stones, plants, and animals? It seems unthinkable not to pose such a question. It seems that even a god might ask it. And the answer is taken from the same source as the question: from usual, normal, daily experience. We know that we can accomplish nothing at one blow. To create a statue out of a stone we must slowly and painfully chisel small pieces of it out until the formless block is turned into a beautiful work of art. And here we have already the theory of evolution, of slow, imperceptible changes. Imperceptibly the plant turns into the animal, the animal into man, and even into civilized man. Since it happens imperceptibly, since no one can notice it, one need not look at it. Consequently there is no exciting surprise and we are content: we think that we have freed ourselves from our limitations and no one is disturbing the natural course of life. I repeat once again: it seems to us that question and answer both originated spontaneously, that no one interfered in this - neither we, nor any other beings.

We only registered objectively something which originated spontaneously, as though it was not we but some ideal registering apparatus. But answer and question alike are purely human.

God could never have asked such a question, and He would never have accepted such an answer. And precisely the thing which distresses us most, the thing which we first reduce to an infinite number of infinitely small changes, and then painfully try to make into something unnoticed and more or less non-existent - precisely that, far from distressing God, far from seeming to Him something which ought not to be, something intrusive, unnatural, is, on the contrary, in His eyes, the beneficent essence both of His own life and of life in general. We are terrified by every creative fiat, by every inexplicable miracle, we are afraid of discovering a break in the course of historical phenomena. We devote all our efforts to banishing out of life everything "sudden", "spontaneous", "unexpected". We describe all such things as chance, but chance in our tongue means something which, strictly speaking, cannot exist. If in any theory, not only scientific but also philosophic (meaning by this a theory which rejects in advance all presuppositions), we discover anything "sudden" or "all at once", we consider our theory irretrievably ruined. And we hold our conviction of the faultiness of everything "sudden" for no premise, but the very truth made word. It cannot be that stones and plants were, and that then "suddenly" beasts appeared, much less men. Nor can it be that man should "suddenly", "for no reason", "precipitately" take some decision or feel some desire; if he took a decision or felt a desire, he had "grounds" for it. Free will in its pure form is a myth, which has come down to us from the distant ages of humanity's prehistoric existence. Not only the determinists, but also the opponents of determinism, who maintain that man is a free creature, yet hold it necessary to reduce freedom into an infinite number of infinitely minute elements, of which the decision which determines our action is then composed imperceptibly. The cult of the imperceptible has permeated our whole being to such a degree that there is in fact much, very much, that we now do not notice. And we dream, as of an ideal, of that blessed age in which no one will any more ask any questions. This will be the final triumph of theoretical reason. Man will cease to ask; he will himself be as God. But this is just where the fatal self-deception is hidden.

Man will ask nothing because he will see nothing, because he will transform everything into the "imperceptible". By plucking the fruit off the tree of knowledge man became as God - but only in his negative attributes, or rather, in one of his negative attributes, in that which God has not. But the object was not to possess one or more of God's negative attributes. We are as God in having no horns, hoofs, tails, etc. - is that a reason for gratification? What we have to aim at is to possess what God has. Consequently we must not be anxious to transform the perceptible into the imperceptible, but rather to make visible even the barely perceptible. We must accordingly throw ourselves greedily upon each "sudden", "spontaneous", "creative fiat", each absence of purpose and motive, and screen ourselves with the utmost care from that emasculator of thought, the theory of gradual development. The dominant of life is audacity, tolma, all life is a creative tolma and therefore an eternal mystery, not reducible to something finished and intelligible. A philosophy which has let itself be seduced by the example of positive science, a philosophy which endeavours, and believes its essential task to be, to differentiate everything problematic and surprising into infinitely minute quantities, is not only bringing us no nearer the truth, it is leading us away from it.

And I wish to repeat once again what I said before: the Fall of philosophy began with Thales and Anaximander. Thales proclaimed that All is One. Anaximander saw in multiplicity, that is, in the eternal problematical, an impiety, a something which ought not to be. After them philosophers began systematically to eschew multiplicity and to esteem uniformity. The comprehensible and the uniform became synonymous with the real and with that which ought to be. The individual, the in

dependent, the different were looked on as unreal and audacious. Some qualification, of course, is necessary. Interest in the mysterious has always lived on in philosophy, particularly in ancient philosophy. Plato and Plotinus lent a shuddering ear to mysteries, knew the meaning of initiation, were themselves initiates. They honoured with reverence the memory of the great sages of the past. At the same time, however, they wanted to be lords over the spirit of man. That is, the esoteric and the exoteric attracted them equally. Aristotle alone forsook the esoteric. But precisely for that reason history left the victory with Aristotle. Even the Middle Ages, which sought so greedily after the mysterious and guessed at it everywhere, took Aristotle for guide. Modernity has now broken altogether with antiquity. Descartes is generally looked on as the father of modern philosophy.

The true father of modern philosophy was, however, Spinoza. Spinoza's whole philosophy was imbued with the thought that God's reason and will differ toto caelo from human reason and will, that God's reason and will have as little in common with human reason and will as the dog-star has with the dog, the barking animal: that is, only the name. Hence he drew the conclusion that what we call beautiful, perfect, good, etc., has no relationship with God. Consequently one has not to laugh, nor weep nor be wroth, but to understand; that is, to ask no questions relating to the things which mean most to us, and to give answers which are totally unnecessary to us. Thus Spinoza taught, and his commandments were received as a new revelation. And no one noticed (men prefer not to notice) that Spinoza himself acted, both as man and philosopher, in the diametrically opposite way. He asked no questions which he did not need, and found no answers which did not concern him. "Omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt" - with these words he closes his Ethics. That is, the "beautiful" which, if one bears Spinoza's earlier words in mind, stands in no relationship to God, is restored to its divine rights precisely because human reason and human will are so loyally devoted to it. And it is towards the beautiful alone, although it is so difficult to attain and is found so rarely, that Spinoza's soul aspires. Further: his "amor Dei intellectualis", the intellectual love of God - why, it consists simply of "ridere, lugere et detestari", and has as little in common with the scientific "intelligere" as the dog-star has with the dog, the barking animal. That is to say, Spinoza, like so many of his ancient predecessors, held that the "intelligere" was only there for the crowd, for "every one". It was an outer decoration: when one mingles with men, one must wear the appearance of an understanding, quiet, composed man, untroubled with doubts. To the crowd one must always speak in the tone of a man in whom power reposes. But for himself and for the initiated Spinoza used quite another language.

Modern philosophy, which has made herself the handmaid of science, has only taken from Spinoza what he kept for the crowd, for the uninitiated: only his "intelligere". It is convinced that questions ought to be made of indifferent, worthless material. It sweeps away beauty, good, ambition, tears, laughter, and curses, like dust, like useless refuse, never guessing that it is the most precious thing in life, and that out of this material and this alone, genuine, truly philosophic questions have to be moulded. Thus the prophets questioned, thus the greatest sages of antiquity, thus even the Middle Ages. Now only rare, lonely thinkers comprehend this. But they stand aside from the great highway, aside from history, aside from the general business of philosophy. Official, recognized philosophy, which aims at being science, does not go beyond the "intelligere", and is, moreover, quite genuinely convinced that it alone is seeking the truth. But precisely it should halt and ask itself: Of what are questions made? Perhaps it would then renounce the idea of transforming all that is important into the imperceptible, which is so imperceptible that it cannot be seen. And then, instead of a world which always and in all its parts remains the same, instead of a process of development - then before man's eyes would arise a world of sudden, wonderful and mysterious transformations, each of which would mean more than the whole process of today and all its natural development. Such a world, cannot, it is true, be

"comprehended". But such a world need not be comprehended. In such a world comprehension is superfluous. Comprehension is necessary for the natural world from man, who came in natural wise into it. But in a world of wonderful transformations, in an eternally unnatural world, comprehension is only an ugly, crude extra, a meagre and wretched gift of the pauper world of limitation. So it was felt by the best representatives of humanity in moments of inspiration and of spiritual ecstasy. But humanity has not been granted to think thus. Omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt. How much divine laughter, how many human tears and curses are needed to learn how to live in such a world, to penetrate into such a world! But we want peace, first and last, we want to count, measure, and weigh automatically, and we assume that this is lofty science and that such science will reveal to us all secrets! And we even hesitate to ask ourselves of what questions are made, being convinced in advance that all questions are made of one and the same material and that the justified questions are simply those which arise from untroubled spirits and can be solved through self-satisfied comprehension.

17 - MORALITY AND PESSIMISM

Whence came good, whence evil? Anaximander, the first Hellenic philosopher, thought that evil began when individual things escaped from the womb of single Being and insisted impiously on beginning a separate, independent existence. So the Pythagoreans thought also. The same idea runs more or less distinctly through the whole philosophy of antiquity. The last great Hellenic philosopher, Plotinus, is of the same conviction. He says that the individual souls tore themselves audaciously free from the One and live in evil so far as they maintain their independence. Plotinus, of course, is expressing Anaximander's thought more accurately. One can, of course, only speak with qualifications of individual things. Only living beings and not things, are normally individuals. Can one describe a stone, a mountain, a river, a piece of iron, as individuals? Have they escaped from the womb of the One? So, too, with the house, the table, the clock, the pen, the statue, etc. All these are "things" and "individuals" only for us, for men. For nature, this or that form assumed by iron, marble, or plaster, has no meaning. Marble in the block or marble in the statue of Apollo is for nature only marble; nature preserves or destroys it with equal indifference, whether it received its shape in "natural" wise or through the artist's hand. In earthquakes, landslides, fires, works of nature crumble or burn equally with works of art, one and the other accepting their fate with equal readiness and passivity.

Consequently one cannot say of things that they have asserted themselves audaciously or impiously; things stand beyond (or this side of) good and evil. Only living creatures assert themselves. They want to "be" and revolt against every attack on their individuality or their "ego". It is here that questions of good and bad begin, as of good and evil. Individuals which assert themselves meet with some resistance. They want, let us say, to eat - but there is no food there; they want to drink - there is nothing to drink there; they want to warm themselves - they cannot. And conversely, sometimes food, drink, and warmth are there in abundance. Why is this so, why is there sometimes everything in abundance, and sometimes too little? Further: all these beings which assert themselves want to "be", while nature, without heeding their wishes, arbitrarily sets a limit to their being by sending them death. And then these creatures revolt and declare that if they are refused food, drink, and warmth, or their lives suddenly cut short without asking them, that this is bad, but if they are given superfluity and a long life, and particularly such a life that the thought of death does not even enter their minds, so that they think there is not and never will be any death, then this is good. In a word, for nature, for that which we call nature, there is neither a good nor a bad. Only for individuals is there a good and a bad, particularly, of course, for man, precisely for the thinking man who remembers the past and imagines the future vividly. And thus man, through his thousand years of experience, has come to the conviction that life holds too much that is insuperably bad. Man must constantly fight and yield. For a moment one can arrange one's lif

e, but only for a moment. To none is it granted to escape death. Even the students sing, "nemini parcetur". The fool, the sage, the serf, the prince, all must pay tribute to death. Before the inevitable man must bow, and accept passively the blows and gifts of fate.

Most men, the overwhelming majority, bear this lot patiently. But there are also some who think, who seek to reach the heart of things. Why is Nature indifferent to that which seems to us supremely important? Nature is infinitely powerful, surely she is right? Perhaps we are wrong. Perhaps we cannot succeed in understanding Nature, in raising ourselves to her level? I think it was thus that the question posed itself to Anaximander and thus to Plotinus, and that it was taken over in the same form by later philosophy and religious consciousness. When man had to choose between the mutually conflicting and irreconcilably opposed endeavours of the insignificant atom-individual, and the vast, infinite universe, it seemed to him quite clear that he could not be right and that the universe was right. An infinitely small part cannot hope for its cause to be of greater import than the cause of the colossal whole. What men hold for good and bad is in reality neither good nor bad. Before the supreme judgment it is one whether a man is full or hungry, warm or cold, sick or sound. It is even one whether he is alive or not. The only thing that is not "one" is that which is specially guarded from the first and for ever. In contrast to the good and bad, i.e. to the valuable from the point of view of the individual, there arose the autonomous, ethical values - the idea of good and the idea of evil. They are autonomous - that is to say, they have no connection with the usual conceptions of good and bad; indeed, they exclude them. In the light of these new ideas of good and evil, the very existence of the individual was revealed as audacity and impiety. What wonder if nature is indifferent to its "good" and "bad"? On the contrary, one may wonder that these bold and impious creatures have so much good provided for them on earth. Nourishment, drink, and much else is, at least, there for them. If one looks rather closer, one may perhaps soon come to the conclusion that all these blessings are only supplied in order that the individuals should pay the fitting penalty for their sin. They must first be given the opportunity to assert themselves to their heart's desire - then the disappointment will be all the more painful and torturing.

However this may be, the contrast between good and bad on the one hand and good and evil on the other can be expressed and explained in this way. Good and bad is what individuals need or do not need. But if the individual comprehends the secret of existence, it must renounce both itself and also its needs, forget good and bad and strive only after the general good. For its own "good" is precisely the fundamental arch-evil, while the real arch-good is the complete renunciation of self, self-annihilation. This I repeat, is the fundamental idea of Hellenic philosophy, from Anaximander to Plotinus. It is also the point of departure of modern philosophy. With Schopenhauer this idea assumes, for the first time, an entirely new form, that of pessimism. For Schopenhauer too the principium individuationis is the beginning and the source of evil. All that is born must perish, all that begins must end. The individual begins, consequently it must perish. In this Schopenhauer differs in no wise from his predecessors. But his attitude to life, his evaluation of life, is different. He might have said with Plotinus, that death is the fusion of the individual with the original One. And he almost does say so. Only - and here is the difference between him and Plotinus - he sees in this neither something beautiful, nor something bad. Existence - whether as an empirical individual or as a metaphysical principle - seems to him equally pitiable and valueless. Or, to put it better, the "will" (as Schopenhauer calls the metaphysical principle), although eternal and real, does not, in its superhuman being, attract Schopenhauer's attention. With all its reality will remains absolutely strange to him. He esteems supreme human creative achievement - philosophy, religion, art - solely because he is convinced that it kills the will to live. It teaches man to raise himself above the good and bad in which life has its only hold, and to aspire towards the real good which denies life.

In no single philosopher is the link between morality and pessimism so clearly expressed as in Schopenhauer. Not only has man no need to be - there is no need for anything empirical, and far less metaphysical, to be. Schopenhauer rejects suicide, in the name of supreme morality, of the supreme good. For with him good requires more than this. It is not the individual entity that must be killed, annihilated, but the will itself, the metaphysical principle: that is the last task of philosophy and of those religions, such as Buddhism and Christianity, which are sufficiently advanced. And now, when Anaximander and Plotinus created their "life", when they exalted their "One" and spurned all that was individual, were they not doing just what Schopenhauer did in our days? Were they not expressing pessimism and the negation of the will to live, only in a less frank and consequently a more dangerous form? The Greeks work out the contempt of the individual, the illusory and senseless character of the existence of the individual human being, as consistently as Schopenhauer himself. They do so, indeed, only in the name and to the glory of the One. But this is precisely the heart of the riddle: what is the point of the whole world-comedy? Why does the One, which is so self-satisfied, so peaceful, so all-comprehensive, need to split itself into myriads of souls, to throw them out into the world, to lodge them in these mysterious, alluring body-cells, if it turns out afterwards that the best that souls could do would be to leave their bodies and return to the One whence they came? It is impossible, with the worst will in the world, to conceive anything more senseless - and the One of the Greeks, in face of all this, is primarily a rational principle. Both in Plato and in Plotinus we find suggestions of an answer to this question, but they are so clumsy that it is not worth while discussing them. It looks as though they had no answer of any sort ready. But if they spoke - not spoke, but sang, and how nobly they sang ! - of their joy at the possibility of returning to "that world", so Schopenhauer, too, exalted with no less joy, and often with real enthusiasm, the philosophy of renunciation. Now, enthusiasm, delight and even ecstasy are psychologically comprehensible to us, especially in men like Plotinus who felt so bitterly the degrading necessity of abiding in the burdensome, despised body.

18 - QUASI UNA FANTASIA

I know not at which to wonder more: man's willful blindness, or his natural timidity. Although one can assume that these two characteristics are interdependent. Man refuses to see because he is afraid. Afraid of what? Often he does not truly know himself. His greatest terror seems to be to violate the "law". Every one is convinced that there are certain laws, eternally existent, and that failing these laws, or outside them, there is only destruction. Our spiritual vision creates for itself horizons as limited as our physical. How alarming to men, even today, is Protagoras's doctrine that man is the measure of all things! And what efforts human thought makes to kill Protagoras and his teaching! They have stopped at nothing, not even at direct calumny - even men like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle who loved uprightness and honesty with their whole souls and honestly desired only to serve the truth. They were afraid that if they let Protagoras prevail, they would become misologoi, despisers of reason, that they would commit spiritual suicide. They were afraid: that is the point. But there was no reason to be afraid. One may begin by pointing out that Protagoras's doctrine does not in the least commit us to hate or despise reason. Protagoras himself, as Plato's dialogues show, did not at all despise reason; he respected it, he genuinely, fervently, honoured and loved it. It is true that Protagoras clearly does not see in reason the last or the first principle of being (arch§Ü). He places man above reason. From this to contempt is, of course, a long step. Consequently Plato's and Aristotle's agitation was quite superfluous, and they committed, perhaps, the supreme crime in concealing Protagoras' s teaching from the later world. They were abetted by Anytus and Meletus - the same who poisoned Socrates. Protagoras's book treating of the gods was burned! But Plato and Aristotle committed a worse crime than Anytus and Meletus. They did not kill Protagoras himself, but they annihi

lated his spiritual heritage. For all the efforts of modern historians, we cannot rescue Protagoras's spirit from oblivion and give it new life. Protagoras was a Sophist, he traded with truth - that is practically all we know of him. One can, of course, suspect that the "judgment of history" was unjust, that Protagoras had real, great philosophical purposes, even if the Sophists did trade with truth. But what were they? Again one must surmise, try to guess, and create for oneself quasi una fantasia of Protagoras even at the risk of error.

"Man is the measure of all things." "Every assertion can be countered with an opposite assertion:" that is all that is left of Protagoras, unless one counts the famous but inconclusive opening sentences of his book on the gods. How is one to understand the meaning of these sayings? On the one hand, they are senseless, as Plato and Aristotle tried to prove, because they contain an obvious contradiction. But just because they are so challenging, so openly senseless, we must assume that a different meaning is hidden behind them from that attributed to them by hostile interpreters. The more benevolent modern criticism does, indeed, try to soften the senselessness of the former assertion by interpreting it in the sense of "specific relativism": not each individual man is the measure of all things, but man in general. Such an interpretation seems more acceptable. But the basic contradiction is still not eliminated, it is only driven underground and made less visible: as Husserl proved conclusively, specific relativism, considered closely, has no advantage whatever over individual relativism. The restrictive interpretation only suspends the verdict; it does not alter it. But Protagoras cannot plead in his own defence; thanks to Plato's and Meletus's efforts he has been robbed once for all of the possibility of defending himself by his own words. But our curiosity, our desire to know, is only fanned by this. The gods are jealous; they will not reveal to mortals the secrets of existence. Perhaps that was just the reason why they helped Plato and Aristotle to finish off Protagoras, and even brought about so unnatural an alliance between them and Anytus and Meletus, the murderers of Socrates - because more had been revealed to Protagoras than the councils of the gods had decreed that man might know.

"The inner strength of a religious idea never ensures it world supremacy" - so says A. Harnack, the learned historian of religious ideas (Dogmengeschichte, II, 272). The inner strength of a religious, and, of course, also of a philosophical idea, never ensures it world supremacy. I am even inclined to express myself more strongly still. I think - and the whole history of human seeking clearly confirms this - that the ultimate religious and philosophic truth, even if it were to be discovered and enunciated, would never be able through the "potentia ordinata", or even the "potentia absoluta" of the gods, to achieve supremacy over human spirits. Truth, the last truth, will always remain hidden from us; that is the law of fate. St. Augustine says: ipsa veritatis occultatio aut humilitatis exercitatio est aut elationis attritio. ("The truth has been hidden from us either to practise us in humility or to punish our arrogance.") (De civitate Dei, XI, 22.) Augustine's explanation may be too tendentious (it is not so easy to unriddle the decisions of the gods), but the fact - occultatio veritatis - remains: truth is hidden from us. And the decision of the gods, I repeat, is unalterable. The means that they employ are, however, manifold. They will always find men both among the common herd and among the elect who are ready to persecute truth in every way. And they succeed easily in this, since every new truth is frightening at first sight. And for this reason the gods have ordained - only gods could invent this - that the last truth is always veiled in contradictions which are simply unacceptable and absolutely intolerable to our spirit, and scare off even the boldest inquirers.

How much has been spoken and written on this, from Heraclitus and the Eleatics, to Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer! It is a generally known fact that the leading philosophic systems are "permeated" with contradictions - one would think it was time to get used to them and to learn to see in them a "gift of the gods" - and yet men still think and will certainly always think that contradictions are som

ething which have attached themselves unlawfully to our cognition and have to be overcome, or if one cannot overcome them, to be disregarded on principle. And how striking is this: not only do the philosophic truths, that is the truths "of the roots and sources of things", always seem, at first, to contradict both appearance and themselves, but all great scientific cognitions at first appear to man to be plainly nonsensical. It has therefore happened more than once that a truth has had to wait for recognition whole centuries after its discovery. So it was with Pythagoras's teaching of the movement of the earth. Every one thought it false and for more than 1,500 years men refused to accept this truth. Even after Copernicus savants were obliged to keep this new truth hidden from the champions of tradition and of sound common sense. Similarly, Newton has been ignored by the majority of mankind until today. Indeed, how could a man accustomed to "see" that weight and solidity are inseparable attributes of all material things - how could he reconcile himself with the thought that bodies in themselves have no weight, that a thin spider's web and a huge stone fall with equal velocity in a vacuum? Aristotle, of course, held such a supposition to be the summit of unreason.

Protagoras's assertion that man is the measure of all things is another flagrant violation of common sense. Put in another way, it is not the objective being that conditions our judgment, but vice versa. One must further assume that Protagoras was not speaking of specific relativism, but of individual: he thought that each individual man measured things according to his own judgment, and there were thus as many truths as men. Worse still, there were more truths than men, since one and the same man thinks one way today, another tomorrow. Where then is the criterion of truth and how shall we distinguish truth from falsehood? And how is man to live if it is impossible to distinguish between truth and falsehood? This last question makes even the Pragmatists, the modern defenders of Protagoras, uneasy, and they try to prove that man can still live and still find a criterion of the truth from Protagoras's point of view, and even give very good grounds for it. One has only to follow the example of the Pragmatists and esteem the useful alone; then one would have a criterion which answers the most exacting demands. The Pragmatists' line of argument reminds one of the logic of some savage tribe or other - I forget which: On what does the earth rest? On an elephant. And on what does the elephant rest? On a snail. This satisfied their curiosity; the earth rests on something, it has a support.

The thought that the earth need not rest on anything would be senseless and even nonsensical to the savage, and even to many Europeans. If they knew Aristotle they would say: "One can say that; but one cannot think it." Even the idea of the force of gravity which carries objects with it has become so closely entwined with man's intellectual nature that he thinks that he would have to renounce thought if he freed himself from this idea. So it is also with Protagoras's teaching of the criterion of truth. Man is the measure of all things! According to Husserl only a madman could think thus. Aristotle says: One can say this but one cannot think it. And yet Protagoras was neither a madman nor a cheat. He simply realized, it seems, that a little snail is as unfitted to be the support for a great elephant as the great elephant for the giant earth. And then a bold and splendid thought came to him: need one support "truth" at all, would truth "fall" if not supported? Indeed it might not fall. Perhaps "general validity and necessity" are no "attribute" of truth, as weight is no "attribute" of a body. In the conditions under which we live, weight is indeed "practically" an attribute of bodies; no man has ever been able to lift up a thing in his hands without feeling its weight. And no one has seen truth, and no one can see it, unless it first fulfills the demands made on it by the law of contradiction. But all probabilities go to show that Protagoras was not speaking of empirical truth but of metaphysical, truth as the immortal gods bear it in themselves.

Even here on earth we can perceive a difference in the relation of different people to truth. I will illustrate this with an example. A queen and her ladies-in-

waiting enter a box in a theatre. The queen sits down without looking round. Since she sat down, therefore there was a chair under her. The ladies-in-waiting looked round first, and after they had convinced themselves that chairs had been pushed forward, they sat down. A queen does not have to look round first and convince herself. She has a "logic" all her own: there is a chair there because she sits down. Common mortals, on the other hand, only sit down when there is a chair. This was perhaps Protagoras's thought. Although daily experience testifies to the contrary, he saw, or perhaps believed, that it is granted to man to create truth, and that royal blood flows in man's veins. One need look round at each step and ask "truth" for permission only in so far as man belongs to the empiric world, in which rules, laws, regulations, real and imaginary, do in fact reign; where all things, even truths, have a weight and fall unless supported. But man strives for freedom. He yearns passionately to the gods and to the divine, although he "knows nothing" of the gods and the divine, or, if you prefer it, because he knows nothing. One need know nothing of the gods, it is enough to hear that they call one to themselves into that lofty place in which freedom rules and where the free rule. And the first step towards the gods is the readiness to overcome, if only in thought, that weight, that centripetal force, that attraction to the earth, to the steady and stable, to which men have now so accustomed themselves that they see in it not only their own nature but the nature of all living things. There are no laws above man. Everything is made for him, both the law and the Sabbath. He is the measure of all things, he is called to be a law-giver like an absolute monarch and has the right to counter every thesis with another directly opposite to it.

19 - TWO KINDS OF LOGIC

"A whole eternity thou wast not, and didst not mourn thereover, didst not say thou couldst not comprehend how the world could exist without thee. But with respect to the eternity in the future in which thou wilt not be, thou dost maintain that this is unacceptable. It is clear that thou art inconsistent." Thus reason speaks to man. "It is, indeed, clear to thee, for thee I am inconsistent. But there is also another kind of logic. When I am once arisen out of nothingness, then it is done; I shall not return again into nothingness, and the second'eternity' is mine." This is the answer of the irreconcilable and willful debater. Against such a one reason can do naught with its own means.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio Index ToC

In Job's Balances \ Part II \ Revolt and Submission

<< | >>

20 - CUR DEUS HOMO?

A man has toothache and he is incapable of anything. He sees nothing, he hears nothing, he thinks only of the pain and his tooth. Neither contemplation nor proofs of reason can convince him that it will all be over tomorrow. The cursed pain absorbs his last strength, clothes the whole world, the whole universe in its grey, torturing, dull colours. Even the idea of eternity can awake in him no enthusiasm, for even eternity seems to him a product of the tooth and the pain. Perhaps it was under such conditions that Spinoza's "Deus sive natura", the "One" of Plotinus and the mediaeval mystics was born, and also that repulsion against all creation of which philosophers speak so much. It is possible that contempt of what Spinoza called "divitiae, honores, libidines" and of our empirical ego aros

e out of some obstinate, enduring pain which men could not remove and which took the name of supreme truth, mounted the throne and rules imperiously over the living and the dead.

Even in Plato, as some of his warmest admirers surmise, the idea of the ideal world may have arisen in connection with Socrates' execution. According to tradition Plato did not visit Socrates in prison, sickness preventing him. Perhaps it was not sickness at all; it was certainly not sickness. The pupil could not look on the impotence of the honoured teacher. And, therefore, he brooded all his life long how it could have come about that Anytus and Meletus, the despicable Athenian judges, the dirty prison jailer, and the cup with the repulsive poison, could have shown themselves mightier than the very truth that was incorporated in Socrates. Plato turned his whole genius to banishing this fearful, never-ceasing, intolerable pain which he felt when he remembered the wretched death of the "best of men . His philosophy and his poetry were struggle and victory over this pain. The whole Greek philosophy which followed him sought, now consciously, now unconsciously, for the words which might have freed man from the mad power of senseless necessity. Mediaeval philosophy continued the work of the great Hellenes and went on seeking with equal enthusiasm and excitement. It is only the modern, or rather, the most modern philosophy, which found the solution of the question in positivism §Ñ la Kant and Comte; to forget plagued and poisoned truth and live for the positive necessities of the next day, year or decade. This terms itself "idealism". It is, of course, also idealism of the purest water which has so possessed the spirit of modern man. The idea is the only god which has not yet been cast down from its pedestal. Scientists worship it no less than philosophers and theologians. If one reads the latest Catholic apologists one will convince oneself of this.

But perhaps it will be objected: "Pain is a condition of the apperception of truth. Truth is truth only because, and only in so far as, it is nailed to the cross. Possibly, certainly. But why, then, idealism? Why bedew the prose, the dirt and blood of the life beyond with the fragrant blooms of earthly poesy? Let it come before us in all its hateful nakedness! Or can this be just the function of creation - any creation, artistic as well as philosophic and religious - to cause lovely flowers of Here to burgeon from the ugly truth of Beyond? And is not man's task, whatever the ancients say, not to return to the original "One" but to move as far away from it as possible? So that in that case, the individual, in escaping from the womb of the One, would have committed no crime by its audacity (tolma), but rather an achievement, the supreme achievement! And was Protagoras, who taught that man is the measure of all things, modest and timid? A new commandment must be created: man shall be the measure of all things, therein lies his supreme purpose.

The beginning has been made. Man has escaped from the womb of the One. Now a great battle awaits him. Not yet have nearly all the fetters which bound him when he still lived in "the womb" been broken asunder. He is still tempted away by memories of his earlier contemplative, almost unreal existence, to the blissful, unperturbed peace of super-individual being. "Reason" still affrights him through the unlimited possibilities and difficulties which await the single, independent being in its new life. Philosophy - mundane as well as religious - which also draws wholly from reason, obstinately contrasts the untroubled peace of past being in the One with the eternal unrest, tension, tortures and doubts of multiple existence. And yet there are already men who no longer believe the whisperings of reason. "Instinct", or something else in them, resists such persuadings. Men resist, resist with all the forces of their nature, the worship of unfleshly ideals, even the loveliest. Even the philosophers, the professional preachers of the godhead of the ideal principle, strive in their lives in every way to shake off its yoke from them. It is as though they, like Socrates, had besides reason a second daemon for guide, which in decisive cases interposes its incomprehensible but imperious final veto. So in the Russian sect of the self-immolators the "idea

l" leaders, when they led the herd of common believers as sacrifice to the flames, used themselves unobtrusively to leave the burning building through a previously prepared exit.

Neither Socrates nor Plato, nor Plotinus himself let his being be absorbed in the "One". The Stoics, meanwhile - witness Epictetus and noble Marcus Aurelius - the Skeptics, Epicureans, and all the numerous schools descended from Socrates and his pupils, immolated themselves conscientiously at stakes of their own driving. Socrates, Plato, and Plotinus, and Spinoza in modern times, developed in the shadow of their philosophic constructions. When they cried, "Back to the One", they advanced - away from the One. Never yet - after, of course, the first break with the One - have men so dared to document their "ego" as Socrates did. And how marvelously! Listen with what reverence Alcibiades speaks of Socrates. But follow him - no, that he does not do; his daemon forbids. It is not for nothing that the astute poet said, "Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor" ("I see the better and approve it, I follow the worse"). Behind these words lies hidden the vast, final, and perhaps most fateful riddle of our being. Alcibiades was a frivolous, unrestful, ambitious man. And he had many "shortcomings" - I do not wish to speak of them. I do not at all wish to "justify" him, especially as that is quite unnecessary; history and the historians have already passed judgment on him. But equally indubitable is this: Socrates, too, had his shortcomings, but Alcibiades was an unusually gifted man, almost a genius. "In hoc natura quid efficere potest videtur experta," says Cornelius Nepos ("in him nature tried to see what she could create"). What else, then, is genius but the great gift of audacity sometimes granted to mortals who are frightened by their "anamnesis" of laws and imperatives accepted in their earlier existence (of the "synthetic, a priori judgments," to express it in modern terms)? Even so Alcibiades saw these imperatives no less plainly than Socrates, and approved them as the "better", but owing to some mysterious commandment (he too, like Socrates, had his own particular daemon and protector) dared to do the "worse", i.e. his own - even as Socrates acted, though he taught otherwise. Ovid remarked this "antinomy" and expressed it with "antique simplicity" in the words I quoted.

How often have men repeated Ovid's verses (we find them even in Spinoza and the Early Fathers) and yet interpreted them as though to aim at "one's own", at the "worse", were weakness, and to follow the "better", the common course, were strength. Why did they choose this interpretation? Ordinary, daily, average experience imposed it on them. In everyday reality the commandments of reason do in fact protect us from disaster, as Socrates always made admirably plain in his dialogues. An overheated man longs for cold water. Reason forbids: if you drink it will do you harm, you will fall ill. He who, seeing and approving the "better", which means the dictates of reason, yet follows the "worse", his own immediate wish, will naturally suffer for it. From this, from a series of similar examples which could be multiplied indefinitely, Socrates concluded: Reason is the source of all knowledge, its truths are unalterable, etc. But here, precisely, lay the mistake; Socrates forgot his daemon. The might of reason has and must have a bound. Precisely because reason is destined to guide man in his empiric existence, to protect him here on earth, it is essentially unable to guide us in our metaphysical wanderings. Reason can tell the carpenter, the smith, the cook, the doctor, the statesman, what is "good" and what "bad". But the "good" and "bad" of the cook and smith, the doctor or builder, are by no means the universal "good" and "bad", as Socrates maintained in his Meditations, and Plato after him. Here there is a genuine metabasis eis allo genos (transition into another field). In the field of metaphysics there are neither cooks nor carpenters, neither their "good" nor "bad". There rules the daemon of whom we are not even entitled to assume that he is interested in any norm at all. Norms arose among the cooks and were created for cooks. What need is there then to transfer all this empiria thither whither we flee to escape empiria?...

The whole art of philosophy should be directed towards freeing us from the "good

and evil" of cooks and carpenters, to finding that frontier beyond which the might of general ideas ceases. But philosophy has been unable to free itself from "theorizing" Socrates. Kant himself in his Critique of Practical Reason restored to reason all the unlimited rights and privileges of infallibility taken from it by the Critique of Pure Reason. Alcibiades and with him all audacity are condemned in advance and without examination as eternally unlawful, dangerous, and harmful. The anamnesis, the innate ideas - Kant calls them the "a priori ideas"; that is, of course, more correct, safer and less questionable - which man brought with him from the epoch of his pre-mundane Babylonian captivity, have got the upper hand. And one must admit that appearances and proofs, rational and empiric, are altogether on the side of Kant and his idealism. For audacity is only audacity because it has no guarantee of success. The audacious man advances boldly, not because he knows what awaits him, but because he is audacious or - if the theological way of putting it be preferred - sola fide. It often, indeed generally, happens that he does not reckon on success at all and indeed may not do so. On the contrary, he plainly envisages a failure and assumes with the utmost horror a responsibility for actions the consequence of which neither he nor any one else can foresee. I suppose that the first entity which escaped from the womb of the One suffered the greatest tortures, if it possessed consciousness at all. Most probably it possessed no consciousness, if it took such a mad resolve. How heavy was the punishment of Prometheus simply because he stole fire from the gods!

There we have it again: "video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor." For philosophic purposes one only has to alter the poet's way of putting it just a little; one should not decide in advance what is better and what worse. One must say: my reason leads me to the one, but my whole being yearns for another. But where, on which side is "truth"? In the forward movement away from the "One" from which we have succeeded in escaping after such indescribable efforts, or in the movement back to the One, in the consciousness that the first audacity was a primal sin? Certainly, if the first audacity was sin, then there is nothing else left but to humble ourselves and to return again to the One in order to expiate that sin. But what if, on the contrary, the first audacity was a great human achievement? If it was the beginning of life? If the "One" which is a "Nothing" is death, and escaping its power means not straying from God but moving towards God? The whole Christian Middle Ages tortured themselves with the riddle: "Cur Deus homo?" It was answered in different ways. Always, indeed, in the spirit of Plotinus, for the Middle Ages were exposed through Augustine and Dionysius the Areopagite to the influence of Hellenism.

But however the explanations may run, the fact then acknowledged universally and even today very widely, is this: there was a moment in history in which God assumed human form and thereby took on Himself all the tortures and difficulties which are the lot in this life of the most unfortunate and miserable man. But why? Cur Deus homo? Why, to what purpose, did He become man, expose Himself to injurious mistreatment, ignominious and painful death on the cross? Was it not in order to show man, through His example, that no decision is too hard, that it is worth while bearing anything only in order not to remain in the womb of the One? That any torture whatever to the living being is better than the "bliss" of the rest-satiate "ideal" being? I think that my suggestion has a right to compete with other answers to the question "Cur Deus homo?" It is not at all necessary to think, in conformity with the wrongly interpreted views of the Hellenic self-immolators, that God assumed human form in order that man should cease to be himself and become an ideal atom of the intelligible world. This end could have been attained in "natural" wise, whatever the mediaeval theologians might argue. Supernatural interference was only necessary because man had to be supported in his mad endeavour, in his incredible and unreasonable audacity of self-affirmation. God became man in order that man, shaken in his original resolve - this was expressed in the Hellenic philosophy - should again be confirmed in it.

But man would not understand God. The mediaeval philosophers and theologians int

erpreted the "glad tidings" in the spirit of their "philosophus" Aristotle. And our contemporaries continue to interpret it in the same way, even the Catholic and Protestant theologians. Can one hope to convince man differently, or must one wait for the Second Coming? Or - the last and most overwhelming, most appropriate reply: Are Plato and Plotinus, the mediaeval theologians with their disputes why God became man, and the "glad tidings" which God incarnate brought to earth - are they no more than empty chatter which one may pardon in young men, but for which, as Callicles said to Socrates, aged and venerable men must be beaten? This objection is very reasonable. With Plato, Plotinus, Anselm, Thomas Aquinas, one may argue. But how is one to argue with a positivist whose self-assurance and complacency surpass even the idea of peace itself? Is one to remind him of the events of recent years? But he has seen it all - and what he has seen has not enriched his knowledge any more than it has awakened in him the doubts which he so much hates.

21 - FINAL CONCLUSIONS

"Mihi ipsi scripsi!" cried Nietzsche, as he finished one of his books. He thought in fact that he had written the book for himself, but he was wrong. One cannot write a book for oneself. One cannot even write a diary for oneself. If a man did write for himself no one would understand him. It is possible that after a few years the author himself would not be able to decipher what he had written for himself. Men change with the years so much and forget their past! Caesar in old age could have understood nothing said to him by Caesar in youth or boyhood. He could not even have deciphered the meaning of his early or childhood notes if he had made them for himself. Everything written is written for others, it is made objective. So far, at least, men have found no ways or means to express themselves adequately. Writers, like artists, are faced with the dilemma: if you write as you yourself see and hear things, others will neither see nor hear them. If you wish others to see and hear, adapt yourself to external conditions and speak what can always, everywhere, be understood by every one. Is one consequently to remain dumb? Consequently I It is not at all necessary to remain dumb. And also by no means necessary to be so hasty with the conclusions. It is enough for the moment to recognize the fact, and then some time, not at once, decidedly not at once, the conclusions also will come; quite unexpected ones, indeed, and far more valuable than those which now rise to one's lips. I think that if we were not so pressed to draw direct conclusions, we should know far more.

22 - THE GORDIAN KNOT

Philosophy is a science. But why do we hear so much of the sincerity of philosophers? If philosophy is a science in the same sense as physics, chemistry, geography, geology, are sciences - then what does the sincerity of philosophers concern us? No one troubles about the sincerity of a physicist who declares that water finds the same level in two communicating vessels. Even if he himself does not believe his assumption, yet if it is right and the fluid does in fact find the same level, that is all that we need. The same is true of the mathematician. He says the relation between circumference and diameter is a constant; and no one thinks of asking whether he believes what he says. Men clearly do not hold philosophy to be a science or philosophers to be scientists, if they demand sincerity of them. The philosopher is clearly primarily a witness and bears witness of something which cannot be tested at will. But if this is so, then sincerity and exactitude are the first necessity. But how ensure them?

We know where experiments with the testimony of witnesses lead. Two entirely disinterested and sincere eyewitnesses often make diametrically opposite statements when they only have to describe simple and uncomplicated events. Take a series of philosophic statements. Mill says that nothing would induce him to esteem God if he were convinced that God did not recognize his moral ideals. In the same way Kant, too, declares categorically that his moral convictions are so intimatel

y bound up with belief in God and the immortality of the soul that if he had to renounce belief, his moral principles must collapse with it. Plato says decidedly that it is better to endure injustice than oneself to be unjust. Schopenhauer enthusiastically preached the "will not to be" and pessimism. Descartes says that he began by doubting everything. Can we rely on all these statements? Hume says that were someone to attempt so radical a doubt, after Descartes's program, he could never be cured of skepticism; and Hume seems to be right. Consequently Descartes's statement should be wrong. Schopenhauer, too, has been suspected, not without reason, of insincerity, and even the tone of his complaint about life makes men disbelieve in the sincerity of his pessimism.

And Kant? Were his moral principles so inseparably connected with his ideas of God and the immortality of the soul? Even Mill, conscientiousness incarnate, sinned by declaring so categorically that he would not have given way to God Himself where his morals were concerned. How cautious must we be, then, with such statements! Listen to the confession of our Russian saints and mystics. They, too, are, indeed, only witnesses, and consequently one must understand how to listen to them. But they would certainly have said to Mill if he had understood Russian: "Swear not, that prison and beggary should be spared thee"; and so it is with almost all philosophic statements. Even the so-called self-evident truths which claim to be equated with mathematical axioms, even they bear the character of a witness's statement. Examples: Aristotle and Heraclitus. Heraclitus denied the law of contradiction. Aristotle answers him by casting doubts on his sincerity: one can, he declares with assurance, say that sort of thing, but one cannot think it. Thousands of years passed, and Hegel, a fervent admirer of Aristotle, took up the cudgels for Heraclitus. How can one know where sincerity resides? In Heraclitus and Hegel, or in Aristotle? I am not even trying to determine where truth resides. But it is equally impossible, as we have seen, to determine where sincerity resides. If Heraclitus had heard Aristotle, he would surely have doubted his conscientiousness. One word more on Hegel. In his "logic" he gives this commandment to the philosopher: Thou shalt free thyself from all that is personal, raise thyself above all that is individual, if thou wouldst be a philosopher. Hegel held himself for a philosopher; does this mean that he obeyed his own commandment; that if, let us say, he had lived in our day, he would "quietly" have accepted all the misfortune which overwhelmed his fatherland?

One could take twice and thrice as many striking examples to show how hard - indeed, how impossible - it is to test the sincerity and conscientiousness of the utterance even of philosophers who are justly esteemed as vessels of philosophic thought. And - the main point - I think that had they themselves had to pose the question of their own conscientiousness as seriously as questions are posed on which the destiny of the world and of humanity depends, they would not have known what to say. I think that Alexander himself would have hesitated to cut the Gordian knot, had he believed in prophecy, and known that the whole responsibility for the future was falling on him. Thus from the fact that the philosophers, each after his fashion, cut the Gordian knots of complicated metaphysical questions, one may conclude that men are either unconscious of the responsibility which they assume, or else feel, by some instinct, that all their decisions count for very little in the balance-sheet of the whole world's spiritual activity. Whether they exalt God or depose Him, whether they admit the law of contradiction or no, whether they are lifted up above the individual or not, whether they call life a good or an evil - it is all one, the decisive voice is not theirs. Men were not asked whether or not they wanted to be when they were fetched out of nonexistence, and will not be asked now when called out of this life into another being or returned to non-existence.

This is all very well if instinct tells us true, if indeed all our thought and all our decisions on the beginning and the end, on the first and last things, suffice to themselves and cannot influence the course of world history. But what if it is not so? What if it is no sure instinct, but unpardonable frivolity or an

evil spirit that drives the best representatives of the human race to such rash action! I believe that any philosopher should make it his sacred duty to confess the latter supposition. His first commandment should not be Hegel's but rather: "Thou shalt know that this or that word of thine can save or destroy thy soul, and perchance all the human race also. If this were so, if the mediaeval idea of the dreadful Day of Judgment were reinstated in its rights, philosophy would wear quite a different air. But how is one to make men learn in the course of their brief earthly life to bear, or at least to assume occasionally, the burden of such immeasurable responsibility? The old ways and means are rejected, the new have yet to be found...

23 - WISDOM OF AGE AND EXPERIENCE OF LIFE

There is an excellent Russian proverb: "Ask not the aged, ask him who knows about life." I think that it would not hurt philosophers, who have argued so much about a priori and a posteriori knowledge, to listen now and then to the voice of popular wisdom. An aged man who, in his many days, has yet seen little of life, inclines to a priori thinking. He believes in unalterable principles, in a rigid construction of life - believes so firmly that he is inclined to hold his convictions for a priori, even innate, given by the gods. He despises "experience", thinks that there is nothing new under the sun, that all that is has often been and will often happen again. The knowledge of the experienced in life is different: as a man experienced in life, he has seen with his own eyes things that he would never have believed if he had not seen them himself. Kant lived to eighty, Nietzsche only to forty-four. But how much more experienced was Nietzsche than Kant! And accordingly, how much more fastidious in the choice of his "convictions"! For Nietzsche, "conviction", even more than a priori knowledge, is something rough, crude, coarse. When "conviction" arrives, says Nietzsche, "adventavit asinus pulcher et fortissimus".

Impatient people who cannot bear protracted inner unrest, and therefore prefer any knowledge, even if fictitious, to uncertainty, speak of Nietzsche's "skepticism", just to be rid of him. What simplicity and inexperience! This is not the place to discuss what constitutes the essence of "pure" skepticism. One skeptic is not the same as another, just as the dogmatist is, in the last end, only a general conception, a thing which, as Hegel rightly taught, bears its own opposite within itself. It does not, indeed, do so because of any life and development inherent in the conception. Neither life nor development is inherent in the conception. But if it bears within itself a contradiction which is revealed on closer inspection, this is only because the conception was created by man, and, like all human creations, is imperfect when confronted with any difficult and comprehensive task. This does not at all mean that all conceptions are self-contradictory, e.g. the conception of a privy councillor, a professor, a major-general, a chess champion, etc. A major-general is not a colonel, a professor not a junior fellow. The characteristics of all these conceptions are so definite as to present no problems to passport officials if stated clearly. This is quite natural; all ranks and their tokens are of our creation, and we have thus been able within our modest scope to achieve ideal perfection. It is different when we try with the help of conception to master a reality not of our creation. Here the matter grows infinitely complicated. Think out what conception we may - reality is not to be caught with it. Being and not being, birth and annihilation, time, space, and eternity, a little insect or a reasonable man, even one particular reasonable man - it need not be Socrates, but any donkey-driver - nothing agrees with the conception, however neatly and ingeniously the definition may have been thought out.

Reality runs through the idea as water through a sieve, and the little that remains has, to our great astonishment, no resemblance with what we put in. It seems as though a conjuror or magician were having a joke with us. Our astonishment exceeds all bounds if, into the bargain, we had decided a priori that the essence

of reality lay in the idea itself. In that case being is indeed equivalent to not-being, not being to being, the living man vanishes, the state transforms itself into a god, reason understands everything, and science becomes the only purpose of the not-being being. And all this because we had imagined that the whole world could be comprehended by conceptions like privy councillor, professor, and chess champion - conceptions which we, of course, have created a priori. Here man is undoubtedly dictating laws to nature, and nature submits to him. But this, I repeat, is how old men think who have long, very long lives behind them. Men with experience of life, even if they are not old, think differently about all this. Here, too, of course, one must not be tempted into generalizations.

Thus, I at this moment imagine Schelling like the picture in his collected works. I have long been haunted by a peculiar feature in his face which gives him an expression of unrelieved and painful unrest. I remember the introductory words of his lectures in Munich and compare them with what he said when he began work in his youth as scholar and teacher. As a young man he wanted to comprehend and subdue the whole world. He comprehended and subdued it, not of course for himself, but like Alexander the Great, for the higher ends of history, for the triumph of ultimate truth. In old age, however, this is shown clearly even in the picture by the peculiar, blinking unrest of his still brilliant eyes and the undecided wrinkles or features of his face, as also by his opening lectures in Munich and later in Berlin, his letters and the remarks scattered about various of his works - in his old age he thinks and can only think of one thing: not he but Hegel has proved himself an Alexander the Great of philosophy. Hegel, his former friend and pupil, who had robbed him treacherously and shamelessly crowned his hollow head with the laurels due to him, Schelling. All questions have retired into the background, the first place is occupied by his intolerable and unremitting grief over the unjust judgment of man. And later, when, towards the end of his life, he was summoned to Berlin, he was still unable for one moment to forget the wrong done to him, and while speaking of the loftiest tasks of humanity and his prophetic calling he is thinking how to take revenge on his old enemy, how to eliminate from the book of history every trace of Hegel's philosophy and scientific activity - this would have been the only revenge which could have lightened his tortured soul. This is the truly dreadful and repulsive experience which Schelling underwent, an experience which, if Schelling had brought himself to use it for philosophy, might have overthrown all a priori which had yet been. But Schelling had behind him a strict schooling in philosophy and life, with its traditional apotheosis of past tradition and of "a priori ideas". Mad courage would have been required to abandon traditions sanctified through long centuries and trust oneself to one's own small, fortuitous "experience". To say to oneself that being and not-being, transcendental philosophy and philosophy of revelation, the whole past of humanity and even the future of the universe meant nothing, while the principal thing was that Hegel, this dull and loose man, this thief and murderer, had conquered the whole world by treachery while noble Schelling was left to himself and the consolations of metaphysics; and that this was the greatest event in the universe, upon which ancient and modern history, the whole past of humanity and its future turned as round an axis. And men guessed nothing of this. No one understands and no one troubles, although the frightful treachery, the supreme crime was done quite openly in the light of day, under the eyes of mankind and history!

So thought Schelling's "empirical ego", and expressed its thought shyly, almost imperceptibly, through hints alone, while his "reasonable ego" developed his earlier ideas of the beautiful and sublime as the one end of life, with apparent loudness and boldness, but without any inner conviction; the portrait and the style of his last works show this clearly enough. How deeply Schelling must at bottom have envied Hegel! Hegel was doubly a child of fortune: he had conquered the world and died with the happy certainty: "Si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinae..." It never occurred to Hegel to suspect his own philosophic disinterestedness, but Schelling knew and could not help knowing - fate did not spar

e him, such knowledge was granted him - that disinterestedness was not for him, that in him the empiric ego had attained the upper hand over the transcendent and transcendental ideals. He knew that Hegel had conquered him, not only "here" in the world of appearances, but also "beyond" in the ideal world. That, not his body, but his soul was doomed and irrevocably lost because he had been untrue to the oaths which he swore as a young man to truth. What was he to do? There were two ways: the one which he himself elected later, in endlessly torturing himself, yet revealing neither to himself nor to others what went on in the secret places of his soul, and behaving as though he were remaining true both to philosophic traditions and to the oaths he had sworn. The other way was that which Luther had taken of old: to declare the Pope Antichrist and all oaths unpleasing to God. To admit openly before all the world that in his youth, seduced by the false temptations of corrupted Rome, he had committed a great crime. That when he promised to burn his "empirical ego" in honour of the absolute philosophic truths, he was betraying humanity and swearing the most godless of vows: "Ecce, Deus, tibi voveo impietatem et blasphemiam per totam meam vitam." Should he do this? But the time for a "reformation" of philosophy was clearly not yet come, and clearly it was not Schelling's destiny to become a Luther of philosophy.

There was, indeed, one other way out, which might appear the simplest and most natural. To admit his own weakness, his own impotence. There are weak men enough, what great misfortune would it be if Schelling were proved one more among many? Not all can be great, not all philosophers! This seems simple and natural; but Schelling did not take this way, and so far as I know, history can show no case of such open and honest humility. Teach humility - so did they all, but none can learn it. I think that if Hegel had found himself in Schelling's place, if it were not heaven crumbling over him but only history playing a trick with him, he would have shown no more self-abnegation than Schelling. And I think, too, that we cannot reproach Schelling if in his great "misfortune" he forgot the sublime philosophic edifices. There is obviously a balance in which Schelling's misfortune weighs more heavily than the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of revelation. But how shall we find such a balance? Schelling, where art thou now? And why comest thou not to defend thy good repute? Or is perhaps good repute itself fallen a prey to rust and moth, and do those who enter another world leave it behind here with us, together with their other treasure? In any case, so long as philosophy remains a handmaid of mathematics and positive science it will not find the right balance: that is almost a self-evident truth.

24 - THE LIFE OF IDEAS

Ideas live a quite independent, free, and autonomous life, as though there were no men in the world at all. They come - who knows whence? They go - who knows whither? Then they return when they think fit. And we "understand" this, it seems to us that this is good, that this must be so, that this is quite in accordance with our highest apperceptions which we have borrowed from the "royal" science of mathematics. Mathematics has the idea of the straight line, the point, the plane. A plane bounded by three intersecting lines gives a triangle; in a triangle the sum of the angles equals two right angles; if the bisectors of the angles meet at a point, the bisectors of the sides also meet at a point, etc. Ideas beget new ideas with a necessity highly agreeable to us. Yes, with necessity, and agreeable, for they release us from any responsibility for their activities and give us an example of exemplary constancy, unalterability, and complete subjection to the supreme law. The bisectors of angles and sides can under no circumstances escape their destiny. today, yesterday, and tomorrow, in the present, in the infinite past, and in the infinite future, in the sight of men, angels, and demons, they have crossed, cross, and will cross at one point. They have no fear of time the all-destroyer. God Himself cannot alter the established ordo et connexio of those things which term themselves triangles, bisectors of angles and sides, etc. Their nature is unalterable and - enviable lot! - they do not feel this their immutability as a burden. Necessity is for them a necessity of their own natu

re, and therefore harmonizes completely with freedom. The triangle is completely content with itself and has never envied the quadrangle, nor even the circle. And even the points of the circle have never desired to achieve the privileged position of the center, and there has been no case in history in which some ordinary point has rebelled against its lot, wanted to be center too, and sulked. And were men to attempt to stir up the points by arguments in favour of the equality of them all, etc., the points who, of course, are well versed in rational philosophy (which was born of them) would answer them: The will and reason of points, as of every ideal entity, differ toto caelo from the will and reason of men.

In the last end these are only similar words, just as one describes with one and the same word the dog-star and the barking animal called dog. And if any one had to learn, it would not be points from men, but men from points. For the point is, as is said above, an ideal being and not a temporal one, which knows neither birth nor death, while all that is real, and consequently man also, rises for a moment out of eternity and sinks into eternity again. If then, you would also share eternity - and who would not - you must become like us and cease to question "ideas" on the sources of their high being. Let them come whence they will and go whither they will, live their independent life and multiply according to their own laws. They are of the same essence as we, the points, and so too are those laws which we and they obey humbly without a murmur of rebellion. The best that you men, you real entities, can attain is to become like us ideal entities. As soon as you understand this, as soon as you melt with us into a single and eternal being, you will instantly make an end of that ceaseless unrest which through your being you have brought into the harmony of the eternal and ever self-contented world. Your unrest is your well-deserved punishment; the wisest among you have long since recognized this great truth. If you want to be released from torture, submit yourselves to ideas, become yourselves ideas. Herein and herein alone lies your salvation.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio Index ToC

In Job's Balances \ Part II \ Revolt and Submission

<< | >>

25 - ENFANT TERRIBLE

The knowledge of children seems to adults incomplete, even amusing, and in any case quite useless. Children have not yet learned to adapt themselves to their surroundings. They judge without regard either to the physical or the social conditions of life. Every child is in a certain sense an enfant terrible. The anxious mother never lets her child out of her sight for a moment. She rightly fears that, left to itself, it would do mischief: it might say or do something naughty, since it has not the "knowledge" possessed by adults. Children are guarded until they achieve experience of life, that is, until they learn to limit themselves sufficiently to be able to exist in our world. "Relative" knowledge, that is, the knowledge determined by the conditions of our earthly being, is thus clearly that of adults. Children, on the other hand, have a non-relative, absolute, but practically quite unusable and even dangerous knowledge. Unfortunately men refuse to see this. Even clear-sighted Plotinus was convinced of the contrary: "In childhood we practise the capacities which belong to our complicated - i.e. limited - being, and the supreme principle rarely sends us light from its heights" (I, i, 2). From this it is deduced that the knowledge of children must be rejected absolutely.

My view is that this is a very great and sad error. The contrary should be the case. We should learn from children and await revelation from them. Our whole philosophic interest, our whole pure thirst for knowledge should be directed towards restoring in our memory what we received in the happy time when all impressions of being were new to us and we took up into ourselves reality without submitting ourselves to the postulates dictated by practical needs. If we want "absolute" knowledge, if we want to see "directly" as a living and reasonable being sees which is bound by no presuppositions, which still fears nothing and is not even afraid of becoming "terrible", then our first commandment must be: Be as children. But this is not granted to adults. Adults "make" their way in life - they have no time for memory. And who would like to turn into an enfant terrible! Only old men, especially very old men who have "no future", live in the past, and above all in the distant past, their early youth and their childhood. But these old men are listened to as little as children and "superfluous" men. Moreover, like children, they are not particularly good at speaking: they are always easily beaten by logical arguments... And so men remain in their limited knowledge, which is useful, and not terrible, and have even created the "postulate" that such knowledge is the most perfect.

26 - DEUS EX MACHINA

The "struggle for existence" appears to us a perfectly objective conclusion from observation, in fact, even as a "simple" statement of fact. But these words contain a whole theory with all the intent inherent in human theories. Why do we struggle for existence? A stone, a piece of iron, water - do they struggle? They are simply there, nothing more. Everything in nature is quite indifferent towards its fate. To a stone, even the most precious, it is one whether it lies on the floor of the sea or on a high mountain, whether it is set in gold or in iron. It is one to it whether it is cold or hot, clean or dirty, even whether it keeps its shape or is crushed to powder. And so it is with everything in nature. It is there, quite convinced that, happen what may, its being cannot be taken from it. Only the Living struggles. The Living needs something, something which can also not be, that can be taken away, and for which one must struggle if one wishes to keep it. This "need", this possibility of "losing" and "keeping" and the consequent necessity of struggle - is a mysterious, supernatural element that has intruded, God knows whence, into the indifferent milieu of the indifferent, natural being. At this "need", at the riddle of this "need", philosophy has to begin with its questioning and examination. For before life appears with its "need" there are and can be no questions.

Even the question of causality, outside living needs, is an empty and senseless question; it is even no question at all, but the purest illusion. Water turns into steam or ice - we ask why? The question has only a sense if we decide in advance that steam is not water and ice also not water; that the one was there first and then the other appeared and we want to explain to ourselves how the one turns into the other, how something "new" appears on the earth. But if we were not, ourselves, beings for which "all is not one", beings which wish, endeavour, and "value" according to their wishes and their endeavour, then steam and ice would be nothing "new", "different" in relation to water; in the same way the beauty of heaven, of the morning star, or of a sequence of notes would be nothing to us. In the inanimate world, the material and the ideal, there is also nothing "new" and no "difference", as there is in it no beauty, no ugliness, nothing important or unimportant. When the snow melts on the mountains and the rivers overflow their banks, then there exists for the man who distinguishes the snow on the mountains from water in flood a relationship of cause and effect; to man it is not one where the water is and what form it wears. If the snow turns into water, gets into the river, and the river floods or destroys a village, man is disquieted, he begins to ask, and then for the first time the apparently "objective" question of causality arises.

But there is nothing objective in it. The world "as a whole" has remained as it was. It is man for whom, through the enigmatic decision of a mysterious and incomprehensible fate, it is no longer indifferent where and in what state - solid, fluid, or gaseous - the water is; man who divided the world into parts and gave to each part a name, he it is who first conceived questions, or rather, he did not even conceive them himself but some being inspired him with them, a being after whose image he was created, that is, a being which is essentially not "indifferent" but "passionate", can rejoice and be sorry, wish, fear, triumph, love, hate, etc. For an indifferent being to whom all was one, like a stone, a circle, a straight line, a round number, the law of contradiction or any other law, could never distinguish the water in the valley from the snow on the mountains, the cloud from the rainbow, not even law from lawlessness, chaos from cosmos.

As long as indifference reigned, if it reigned and was the principle of the universe, there could be no question of causal connections. At the best there would be "something", and that would be all - but most probably there would be nothing at all. If, therefore, we reflect on causal connections we must direct our attention first and foremost to the most inexplicable form of these connections: on the connection of the outer world with the inner world of humanity. The snow thaws on the mountains - that is the "cause" why men drown in the valleys, are condemned to death or, as it was with the inhabitants of Egypt, have life and superfluity assured them. What have the snow and the life of humanity in common? In order to hide the riddle which lies here, human understanding, which dislikes disquietude, seeks to explain cause and effect and to discover the connecting links in the chain. It finds them, hides and overcomes for a while its unrest. But only for a while. Unrest cannot be expelled from life. It lies in wait for us at every step, it has even slunk secretly into modern positive philosophy, which has expunged from life everything "unnatural", or rather "supernatural", with such consistency and self-assurance.

With this ceaseless and ever growing disquietude every man must deal for himself. And perhaps this must be so, perhaps it is the greatest and most important event of our lives if we, deprived of every support of common thought, are forced to confront the last secret face to face - monos pros monon, as Plotinus solemnly called it. And then it is that the "question of causality" reveals itself before us in its whole depth and menacing force. So, for example, with torture. We all know that physical injuries cause pain. Physiologists, psychologists, and philosophers, each have their own good explanation of the origin of pain, and all explanations agree in the end in one thing: that there is no reason for questioning here: that pain is a natural phenomenon like other natural phenomena and has no superior right to an explanation. If one knocks oneself one feels pain. Yes, but this is either an absurdity or a great mystery. One knocks a tree, a stone, metal, one even knocks an organic body, a corpse, and no pain arises. Why, then, are we so frightfully shocked when we read reports about torturings and cannot imagine what would happen to us if a man were tortured before our eyes? Or is that a lack of scientific method, is it prejudice of the monos? The ancients, Stoics, Cynics, Epicureans, Platonists, were not afraid of asking themselves such a question, and they answered it openly. They declared that pain had nothing to do with man, that it was an adiaphoron (something indifferent); pain belonged to the body but not to the soul; for the soul there were only virtue and wisdom and, therefore, a wise and virtuous man must be happy even if he were burned in the tyrant Phalaris's brazen bull. Plotinus taught that the death of friends and relations did not matter to us; we must be indifferent even towards the destruction of our fatherland.

So, and only so, must the question be posed. We think that the ancients had passed from the field of theory into that of practice, but this is a false view which hinders us both from understanding the ancients and from seeing our own prejudice. We interpret the ancients as Xenophon did Socrates. Even Xenophon saw in So

crates only a noble moralist anxious to make men better. We have discovered that Xenophon did not understand Socrates, and we seek for the true Socrates in Plato's works. It is time to recognize that it would be a mistake to see in the post-Aristotelean philosophy only practical endeavours or at any rate predominantly practical endeavours. It is just the reverse - it is our scientific attitude which is predominantly practical. Only we do not notice that we, like all men in every age, identify our fortuitous and temporal interests with the eternal. We are convinced that we are seeking unselfishly for an unselfish, objective truth simply because we have carefully hidden our "selfishness" and do not see it.

But our "selfishness" is amply revealed in the very conception of causality, although we are not thinking either of Phalaris's bull or of our immediate needs. For if there were no interestedness there would also be no idea of causality. Our interest is twofold. On the one hand, the outer world must be divided into parts for us to be able to overcome them; on the other hand, those parts must be connected as closely as possible in order to leave nothing, or as little as possible, of the unforeseen which nips in the bud the possibility of any systematic progress. At the most, one can say that in the world, which we divide into parts, phenomena do take place as though the world were composed of different parts and as though those parts determined one another. It is certain that were not we, like Xenophon, preoccupied only with utilitarian ends, we should not interest ourselves in what look like relationships existing between what look like parts. We should try to grasp what lies behind the "looks like", and then those cases would seem to us the most important in which we could catch behind the natural order even the merest glimpse of deus ex machina, not what "looks like one" but in very truth existent, as in the previous example of the knock and the pain. Neither the knock nor anything connected with it in the sense of physical changes, explains the pain. When pain came, it was without any "explanations" or "reason" whatever, and if it testifies to anything, it is only to something quite inexplicable, as the harmonia praestabilita, the creative fiat, etc. And thus the law of causality, the principle of the regularity of phenomena, and, indeed, the whole idea of self-sufficient order are assumptions highly useful, for practical purposes, but totally ungrounded and erroneous. The self-sufficient, eternal, "natural" order is the purest fiction, and a fiction, at that, created in deference to our limitations, as Xenophon, in deference to his limitations, created Socrates the moralist for himself and posterity. This must be admitted openly, without lulling ourselves and our unquiet to sleep by reflecting on the great achievements of the human spirit.

These great achievements have, of course, given us much. But even had they given, and could they give, ten times as much, yet we must not make of them an idol. There is no need to renounce the gifts of the earth, but we must not forget heaven for their sakes. However much we may have attained in science, yet we must remember that science can give us no truth, because, by its very nature, it will not and cannot seek for the truth. The truth lies there where science sees the "nothing", in that single, uncontrollable, incomprehensible thing which is always at war with explanation, the "fortuitous". Science would make unremarkable everything remarkable. Science is only happy and content when, after it has done its work, it has left a field bare of opposition. But despite science, the unremarkable refuses to lose all its meaning, it strains all its forces to become as remarkable as possible, to transform itself from a point, from the non-being to which science condemned it, into a giant Deus - even a Deus ex machina (that does not daunt it) - an arbitrary fiat, etc. Whether this is done with "sufficient reason", whether the principle or postulate of regularity is maintained, whether the "eternal" order is infringed or no - this troubles it as little as regularity, causality, order, and all the rest of the ideal world trouble about the real world.

27 - WHAT IS BEAUTY?

All allow this to be a just question, and we clearly do not suspect that in raising this question we are shutting ourselves off from access to the best there is in the world. It seems to us so natural to interest ourselves in the essence of beauty. Alcibiades was beautiful; Helen, for whose sake Troy fell, was beautiful. Eurydice, for whose sake Orpheus went down into the underworld, was beautiful; this statue is beautiful, this picture, the sky over me, the sea, a sonata of Mozart's; there are many beautiful things made even by craftsmen, such as the binding of an old Bible, etc. If, we think, there are so many beautiful things, there must also be beauty, and then after we have grasped the "essence" of beauty, we shall penetrate into the secret of the universe, we shall reach the source from which that streams into the world which we hold for the supreme value. This is so obvious that no one even thinks that the contrary might be possible: that after we had mastered the "source" of beauty, we should lose beauty, just as the stupid, greedy beggar in the fairy story, after he had killed the goose (which was also the source of golden eggs), had nothing left but the dirty entrails. What we hold for the "source" is in its nature no source but a deceptive will-o'-the-wisp. That is a riddle, but it is so. We must choose between beautiful objects and "beauty". We must admit that we call both Helen and Eurydice beautiful, but that they have no "common factor".

Or, more accurately, what they have in common does not constitute their essence. Orpheus would not have gone down into the underworld for Helen's sake, the Greeks would not have gone to Troy for love of Eurydice. So, too, with Cleopatra. Pascal remarks that if Cleopatra's nose had been a little shorter history would have taken another turn. That is a profound and just thought; history is usually guided by infinitely minute quantities. We who have the "fortune to be participators in "great" historical events know this only too well. But it is equally true that if another woman of even greater intrinsic beauty had ruled Egypt instead of Cleopatra, Caesar and Antony might not have noticed her, while Octavius might have been bewitched by her. And more: the beautiful sky cannot replace the beautiful sea, but neither can the beautiful sea replace a beautiful picture. If, then, we follow the habit of reason and compare beautiful objects with one another, the result will be the opposite of the usual: we shall be amazed, not at their similarity, but at their absolute contrasts. The beautiful in Eurydice has nothing but the name in common with the beautiful in Helen, as St. Paul has nothing in common with Pavel Chichikov [the hero of Gogol's Dead Souls]. And even less - if comparison is possible in such case - has beautiful Eurydice in common with the beautiful sea. Every beautiful thing is something absolutely irreplaceable and thus bears no comparison with anything else. Precisely for that reason, the word "beauty" tells us nothing at all about beautiful things. And no conclusions can be drawn from the "conception" of beauty or the "idea" of beauty, about beautiful works of art or nature. The pleasure given by the contemplation of the beautiful is the only "common factor", but it does not lie in the beautiful objects. And were someone to find a method of evoking such "pleasure" through artificial excitement of the nerves, we should not thank him for his gift. In short, if we insist on cross-examining"beauty" and explaining it, we shall have to cross-examine separately every single object which has got, in this way or the other, into the category of beautiful things.

There can be no question of mastering in the conception or the idea the whole infinite variety of beautiful objects. We shall be answered that it is simply impossible, not only to examine, but even to look at all beautiful objects, that even ten lives as long as Methuselah's would not suffice for this enterprise. I know myself that it is impossible. But I know, too, that it is one of the rare cases of impossibility which one greets from one s whole heart as something desired. There is no need for any one to master the "variety" of beauty in the idea or in any other way, for the moment that variety were mastered, the living source of beauty would dry up once for all. And there is no need, either, to ask what beauty is. But he who loves beauty and seeks it never asks what he seeks and loves. He does not need to justify and explain himself "before all men not even before

himself. He knows that it is quite unimportant that the beauty which he treasures and loves should be that beauty which all can see at anytime. Even with generally recognized works of art the best does not reveal itself with the certainty for which the theoreticians of the beautiful care. Only that reveals itself which is alike for all, that which is of secondary importance. For this reason the philosophers of aesthetics who have tried to attain the like for all have not got beyond commonplaces, and have not unveiled the secret of beauty. And, of course, they will not unveil it. They will not be able to cross-examine all beautiful objects; they cannot master the variety. But what they can learn through examination is not worth discovering; it does not hide itself, it lies there open before all men's eyes.

28 - LIBERUM ARBITRIUM INDIFFERENTIAE

Wherein does the central question of free will lie? It is generally represented thus: Am I forced in every case to act in a certain way, or am I free also to act otherwise? A brave soldier remains on the battlefield under hostile fire, although he could also flee. A good man gives his last shirt to a beggar, although he could also not give it. Honourable Cordelia speaks the truth which destroys her, although she could also have lied. Virtuous Brutus kills his friend Caesar and involves himself in a civil war which he hates, although he could have lived quietly at home with Portia. Where, then, have we to seek freedom of will? in the fact that the soldier did not flee, that the man gave his shirt, that Cordelia spoke the truth, and Brutus lifted up the dagger against Caesar? or are all these "actions" nothing but externals, while the essence of freedom lies not in the actions, but before them, not even in the decisions, but earlier still in the "will" itself? The soldier stands under fire, Cordelia speaks the truth, Brutus kills his friend - all this is only the ordo et connexio rerum, behind which lies the ordo et connexio idearum, and it is in the latter, the ideas, that the essence and secret of freedom lies hidden. A flash of lightning might have killed Caesar, a parrot might speak the truth or a drunken man get rid of his shirt; the "actions" would have been the same, but there would have been no trace of freedom. This "freedom" lies somewhere far away and deep, while actions are only pure externals, from which we draw conclusions with more or less justice about the inner happenings of human life.

For that reason the question of freedom of will has so vast an importance in the history of human thought. It seldom arises independently. It is always connected with the basic question of being, and it has burned up and glowed with especial vehemence in those epochs in which men were revising their views on the ultimate bases of life. So it was during the Pelagian dispute, and in Luther's dispute with Erasmus. Luther abandoned "free will" to his opponent, quite gladly and without a struggle - in so far as it was not a question of good or evil, of the salvation or destruction of the soul. For him Buridan's ass was no problem; the problem began where the discussion reached the relation of man to God. It was the same difference as between Augustine and Pelagius: is man saved through his own force, through "works", "merit", or through grace? Augustine, quoting St. Paul and the prophet Isaiah, spoke of grace; Pelagius, trusting his own reason, required works. The Greeks, too, pondered not a little on this question, and tried to solve it, in a slightly different form but with the greatest earnestness. Was Oedipus acting freely when he killed his father and married his mother? Or was Pharaoh in the Bible acting freely when he kept the Jews back in Egypt, when it is written in the Scriptures that "God hardened his heart". In both cases a man performs actions of world-historic importance, is punished for them most heavily, and is clearly not in the least free in respect of them. Destiny, the gods, God, are over us~ all is determined through the will of the Supreme Principle, against which none can set himself. Even a sparrow does not fall to the ground against the will of Providence, as Hamlet says and the Scriptures teach. Thus, if men reflect on free will they cannot leave untouched the primary source of life.

Thence, too, there arises at first sight this curious paradox: many men, or many men who have thought and felt deeply, have denied man's freedom of will with all the strength of conviction of which they have become capable only in moments of supreme spiritual exaltation, and have thus agreed in their assertions with the superficial materialists who have "simply drawn their conclusions from the general thesis of the prevailing regularity of phenomena in the world. And I think that an ordinary determinist, even one not particularly acute, if he listened to Luther or St. Paul, would prefer any liberum arbitrium to that servum arbitrium which they have undertaken to defend. For one must be blind and dumb not to feel under all their arguments, even the most abstract, the doctrine of faith, of grace and of Almighty God who created our world after His image out of nothing. The same can be said of Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and even Kant. They deny man freedom of will because they clearly cannot make up their minds to place so precious a treasure in the hands of a mortal and limited being. Spinoza in his youth, bearing Descartes in mind, admitted man's freedom of will; at that time a man placed in the situation of Buridan's ass would have been no man but a wretched ass, if he had taken no decision. In his riper years, however, when he had grasped the essence of things more deeply, he too felt that man must not be allowed the right of dominating his destiny; and with his native decision he did not even stop before obvious nonsense and declared categorically that a man who had got into the position of Buridan's ass would have died of hunger.

I think that Spinoza experienced a quite particular satisfaction in the right - the inner and consequently quite unfounded right (tertium genus cognitionis - cognitio intuitiva!) - . - of proclaiming aloud so challenging a nonsense. It is hardly possible to believe that he did not realize the nonsensicality of the assertion that a famished or even a merely hungry man who had to choose between two bits of bread equidistant from him would die of hunger rather than make a choice because he had no "reason" for preferring the one to the other. If he did say so, it was only to open a rift in the idea of the possibility of human free will. God, he maintained, and God alone possessed free will. It would be madness to leave man to take any decisions "freely". God had given freedom once, to the first man, and now saw that anything was preferable to what resulted: man exchanged Paradise for our toilsome life on earth. Who knows what more he might have contrived, what further disasters he might have called down on himself, if after expulsion from Paradise, he had been left with freedom? Only if one assumes that God is indifferent towards His creation, that everything is all one to Him, that His basic qualities are indifference and dispassionateness - only so can one abandon man quietly and even so indifferently to himself. In such a case "freedom" and "necessity" are equivalent conceptions which are swallowed up in impersonal indifference.

Of course, Spinoza's paradox is, strictly speaking, quite unnecessary. Man can well be allowed to make use of what is God's attribute; only, the precious treasure must not be placed at the disposal of a limited and ignorant entity. Thus Luther came far nearer to the truth when, disregarding logical consistency, he gave man full authority to do as he would, within the limits of practical acts. Even Kant, who was clearly trying to express in scientific form what Luther put in the phraseology of religion, sinned grievously against the truth when he made the whole field of empiria dependent on the principle of necessity. In the empirical field man is granted a certain freedom - but only within the limited measure suitable to a limited entity. He can go right or left, choose which he will of several like objects, even act in more important cases (I should not care to say which) without considering anything but his fortuitous whim. But the more grave, weighty, and important the dilemma confronting man, the more the possibility of free action vanishes for him; to choose between good and evil, to decide his metaphysical destiny, is not granted to man. If a chance leads us to the edge of the abyss, if, after many years of peaceful, carefree life, some menacing "to be or not to be" confronts us, like Hamlet, then it seems to us as though some new, enigmatic power - perhaps beneficent, perhaps hostile - were guiding and determi

ning our action. Ordinary determinism, with its inclination towards "natural" explanations, refuses to perceive this - for its whole purpose lies in not going beyond the limits of what it is accustomed to consider comprehensible. If man actually receives help from some strange and mysterious source - one must accept it, as one accepts all that is profitable, but one may not imagine a "mystery", for this is too enigmatic, and threatens one, if one notices it, with extreme disquiet.

But willful blindness towards the unknown and fear of it do not alter the facts: something imperious and irresistible fetters our freedom and guides us towards ends unknown and incomprehensible to us. How could it be otherwise? How could one, I repeat, allow weak, impotent, limited man an even partial share in the solution of the basic problems of his being? How should he, who came but yesterday into the world and is wholly occupied with thinking how to keep a foothold on it - how should he know whither to turn his steps and what to make of himself? Time is infinite, space is infinite, there are innumerable worlds, life's riches and its terrors are inexhaustible, the secrets of the universal structure are incomprehensible - how can an entity hemmed in between so many eternities, infinities, unlimited possibilities, know what it has to do, and how can it choose for itself? Plato, indeed, allowed anamnesis - the recollection of what was in previous lives - but only to a very limited degree. We remember at times what we saw when we lived in freedom, but we remember it rarely and vaguely, and besides, we do not remember the most important things. For that reason, too, Plato believes that the soul solves the fundamental questions of her being before birth, before becoming incarnate in the flesh, when she still has knowledge of the truth, not mere memory, and knows not just a little, but all that need be known. The soul chooses her own lot, but not after she has come down upon earth, but before, when she still lives in the intelligible world. But as soon as she has descended upon earth she loses her knowledge and with it her freedom, and acts now, not as today she thinks it necessary to act, but as she was commanded to act before eternity began, according to the lot which she chose.

We see that the most profound thinkers have suspected a great mystery in freedom of will. Malebranche says textually: "La Libert§Û est un myst§Úre." And presumably this is so. Every attempt to grasp the idea of freedom, every attempt to strip from her the secret veil in which she has always appeared before the best representatives of philosophic and religious thought, merely leads to the illusion of a solution, and will be punished sooner or later in every sincere inquirer with deep and torturing disappointment. It is impossible to speak of free will (as of anything affecting the first and last truths) in the language of pure conceptions purged of contradiction, if one wishes form and content of the word to correspond even approximately. Either one must simplify reality, i.e. distort it past recognition, or permit oneself inevitable, almost paradoxical contradictions, or else, like Plato, have resort to myths.

Or - and this is obviously the right way out - one must not be above either contradiction or myth. One must agree once for all that all our conceptions, however we construe them, are bi-dimensional, while truth is tri-dimensional or more. Therefore in speaking of free will it is impossible to start from an exceptional case, like Buridan's example. Still less can one rely on the general principle of no effect without cause. Between the "freedom of will" of Buridan's ass, or even of no ass, but a man confronted with a similar dilemma, on the one hand, and Augustine saving his soul or Plato meditating on Socrates' death and the fate of the just on the other, there is so great a difference that to reduce all these cases to a single problem would mean having eyes and not seeing, having ears and not hearing. And a conception covering alike Augustine and Plato and all men and beasts who hesitate before an impending decision and take a decision, would monstrously overstep its competence and terms of reference. This overstepping, which is so customary in philosophy, must be most carefully eschewed by those who still believe that philosophy, although it never has given and never will give fi

nal answers to the questions which itself raises, is yet, with art and religion, that which men have always justly esteemed their supreme good. Of course the philosophical solutions of problems are transitory; I even hope that the time is not far off when philosophers will be allowed the privilege of admitting openly that their duty does not lie in solving problems but in the art of depicting life as unnatural, as mysterious and as problematical as possible. Then its chief "failing" - the immense number of questions and the complete lack of answers - will cease to he a failing and turn into an advantage.

29 - QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Posing questions is not the same as asking. A parrot can also pose a question. And in a certain sense all men are nine-tenths parrots. They speak, but behind their words lies nothing more. Thus if somebody asks what is time or what eternity, even what is good, or death, it is not to be thought that he is "knocking" and that, if the Scriptures speak true, it must be opened unto him. He is not knocking at all, he is only pronouncing words. "Knocking" is not so easy, none of us "knock" except on rare, very rare, occasions. And for that reason, perhaps, it is not opened unto us. Even the saints of old often preferred reasoning to knocking. But now, when we have so many books to hand, each a compendium of so many ready-made ideas, who should go seeking at his own peril and risk? Particularly when no one believes the Scriptures. Every one is convinced that it will not be opened, knock as one may, that there is no one there to open. Therefore men prefer to construct ingenious combinations out of old ideas, instead of thinking and seeking - instead, that is, of making the enormous effort which alone brings forth questions worth the answering.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio Index ToC

In Job's Balances \ Part II \ Revolt and Submission

<< | >>

30 - KNOW THYSELF

We often hear: "That man does not know himself, but I know him." Indeed, it is usual for men not even to attempt to know themselves. Others may say of them that they are kindly, irascible, gifted, clever, bold, fine, inventive, etc., but they could say nothing of themselves, if asked. An outside observer will be correspondingly better able to predict their actions. So it comes that others know a man better than he knows himself, although he sees and feels himself directly, while to others it is never granted to look into his soul. How could it happen that he who has not seen - knows, and he who has seen, who still sees - knows not? This is in my opinion an extraordinarily, a quite exceptionally interesting paradox. If we go into it deeply we may learn many new things about the "essence" of knowledge. To know, one clearly does not need to see, but only to judge, i.e. to pass judgment according to purely external indications. Therefore knowledge has ever been knowledge of that which lies uppermost, on the surface, of what has covered the reality.

Nature has indeed contrived that one man does not even notice another, that he actually dares not know him. Each of us is eternally hid from prying eyes in the wholly impenetrable shell of the body. And those who predict our actions do not know us at all, cannot and do not want to know us. To say of a man that he is brave, clever, noble, etc., means really to say nothing of him. It simply means ev

aluating him, measuring his importance by the standards customary from time immemorial, and weighing, or "judging" him. A man who is to us clever or stupid, brave or cowardly, generous or stingy, does not necessarily seem to himself either stupid, brave, or generous. For him, apprehending himself directly, all these categories and standards simply do not exist. He possesses no categories for the cognition, the knowledge of himself; he does not need them. In so far as he is obliged, as a temporal and social creature, to apply them, they burden and even distort him. The basic character of all men is instability, and the right to be unstable is his chief treasure, for instability is life and freedom. But for others, instability in their neighbour is intolerable. And even for the man himself, instability is his most perilous quality. All inner work, all education of the "soul", is directed toward instilling permanent habits, creating what is called a "character". Even art requires training. To become a virtuoso one must make up one's mind to limit one's interests to one single field, i.e. to train oneself for steadiness. And thus all men involuntarily become more or less of specialists, i.e. they renounce much to attain a little and, somehow, to exist. "Self-knowledge" tends towards uprooting and repressing all that is unstable, free, originally divine in oneself and submitting oneself to regulations and standards evolved from history; and thus, despite the ancients, "know thyself" is by no means a divine commandment.

Divine commandment does not compel self-knowledge, or even permit it. As we know from the Bible, God forbade the first man to eat of the tree of knowledge. And when our forefathers transgressed the commandment and ate of the forbidden fruit, what, really, happened to them? They were ashamed of their nakedness! Before they "knew" themselves they were not ashamed of their nakedness, they admired it instead of "judging" it. Their being was subject to no outer judgment, they judged themselves not at all, as none judged them. And then there was no nakedness, there was only beauty. But then came "Know thyself" and the "judgment" began. It is clear that the rule "Know thyself" is a human rule. Its sense is that each shall value and measure himself as his environment values and measures him. In other words, he shall not feel himself as in reality he is, but only regard his picture as it is mirrored on the surface of being, or, to use Kant's phraseology, not interest himself in the thing in itself, but only in its "appearance". And in the course of centuries, public opinion has attained its goal. Man, forced ever to "know himself", i.e. only to regard his picture, has forgotten how to see his "essence". Only the appearance and what walks in appearance is accessible to him now, not only in others, but in himself also. And were he to contemplate his real ego, he would not dare tell even himself what revealed itself to him: so greatly would his ego in itself differ from that "apparent" ego of which all the world knows so much, and of which he has grown used to knowing only what others know. His real ego would appear to him ugly, senseless, mad, fearful. He would flee from it to the "apparent" ego, which is not so pitilessly unmasked, even before the unjust and interested judgment of others, as our real ego, which conforms with nothing and has no resemblance to anything of all that we usually hold normal and complete.

And obviously, not only our knowledge of our ego, but all our knowledge, is only knowledge of the apparent. The whole world is for us only an "object" that never blends with the subject, even in those philosophical systems which have undertaken to remove the barriers which divide subject from object. Such "knowledge", where what is to be known is not object, where there are only subjects, is repugnant to sinful mortal nature. We shall even "ennoble" Nature herself, force her to look into our glass. Who knows? Perhaps such a transformation of the "thing in itself" into an appearance has a meaning of its own in the world process. The thing in itself is only matter, something obscure, coarse, dull; like all substance, it is subject to transformation, and is transformed in time and history. Perhaps then, knowledge has absolutely no need to "go deep" into the essence of the object, and the duty of metaphysics is not to draw up to the surface all that was hidden in the depths. Must the subject be object until "the time comes", unt

il it is so polished that it need no longer hide beneath the shell of "shapes" foreign to it? Nietzsche, for example, was already bold enough to entice out into daylight the "blonde beast" which men have pursued so pertinaciously since the world creation, and perhaps the day will come again on earth - or not on earth - when the blonde beast will cease to seek darkness and "be ashamed of its nakedness". Man will no longer need to hide and cover up, as he must today. Everything will be subject to knowledge in like manner, and our knowledge will not be sentence, not judgment of all upon one and of one upon himself, but simple, free, unjudging comprehension. The "thing in itself" will stand before us in its natural shape, and men will forget that it was once only allowed to "appear" and that its real being itself was called in question.

31 - THE "UNKNOWN"

Sometimes a small, purely external success wholly alters a man's mood, and with his mood also his whole philosophy. Man's reason is just as easy to corrupt as his soul. And further, the reason never notices that it has been corrupted. It begins to see clearly and plainly where even yesterday it could distinguish nothing, and it remains convinced that it is only doing its "objective" work in conformity with its own peculiar laws. Then the success is followed by a failure, the reason loses its vision and again fails to suspect the true situation. It is still convinced that it is only registering, describing impartially. But all the time it is simply expressing the hopes and fears of the soul, which can only abandon itself to its moods, but is either unable or unwilling to reckon, measure, weigh, compare present with past and future. But if the soul is exposed to passions, if the reason cannot conquer the soul and subdue it - where then is one to seek the eternal truths? Or are they not necessary at all? Here on the shifting sands of time we can get along so, but "there" - if there is a "there" for men - the soul will be stronger, the reason more acute, and perhaps also truth will be more approachable and more tolerable...

Or another deduction: we must renounce traditional presuppositions, cease to value passionlessness and to hold the absence of wishes for the basic quality, the true nature of the Supreme Being, and allow the passions to do their work openly. Then it will appear that the soul is not nearly so wicked as it commonly appears, and the reason not so unreasonable and weak, and it will not let itself be betrayed so easily as the "connoisseurs" of man's spiritual life have taught us to think. The philosophy will perhaps breathe more freely. And then it will seek ontology no longer in logic but in psychology. And it will restore to psychology the soul, the true, living soul, with its passions, its hopes; in short, with all that "sensuality" which has been so long and so fruitlessly persecuted by the best representatives of human thought... Suddenly the "last" will become the "first". Even the Supreme Being will be revealed as "passionate" and will not only not be ashamed of its passions, but will see in them the first characteristic of spirituality and life. And just as "suddenly" we shall at last understand the enigmatic words of the Bible: "God created man in His image."

32 - IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD

If Plato is speaking truth, if philosophy is nothing but preparation for dying and death, we have no right to expect appeasement and joy from it. On the contrary, whatever we may say and think of death, behind all our words and thoughts lies hidden ever a vast unrest and supreme tension, and the deeper we sink ourselves in the thought of death, the more will our unrest grow. Thus the last task of philosophy is not the construction of a system, not the explanation of our knowledge, not the reconciliation of the visible contradictions of life - all these are tasks for positive science. Unlike philosophy, they serve life, i.e. transitory needs, but never think of death, i.e. of eternity. The task of philosophy is to tear itself loose from life during life, if only in part. And even as man comes into the world wailing, or awakes with a cry from a torturing fever dream, so

too the transition from life to death must clearly be accompanied by a senseless, desperate effort whose proper expression will be also a senseless, desperate cry or a wild sob. I think that many philosophers have known such an "awakening" and have tried to tell of it. The artists, too, have spoken of it not a little - witness Aeschylus, Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, and in our time Dostoevsky and Tolstoy; but of course they spoke in "words", and the "word" has an enigmatic power of only letting through that which is suitable to life. The word was discovered for life - to hide from man the secret of the eternal and to divert his attention to that which passes here on earth. Immediately after the creation of the world God called man to Him and commanded him to give names to all creatures. And when the names were given, man had thereby cut himself off from all sources of life. All the first names were names of species: man named things, he divided them into species, that is, he determined which things he would be able to use so long as he lived on earth, and in what way. Then he was no longer able to comprehend anything except what fell under its name.

Indeed, it is probable that he did not even wish to do so: he thought, and thinks today, that the most important and essential part of things is that which they have in common, that which he has named with names. Even in man, even in himself, he seeks the "essence" - again the general. Our whole earthly life is directed towards bringing out the general and eliminating the particular in it. Our social existence - man is obliged to be a social animal, for he cannot be a god and will not be a beast - foredooms us to the lot of "general being". We must be as our surroundings let us be. Our surroundings will not endure senseless crying or wild sobbing, and even in the heaviest moments of complete hopelessness we make ourselves appear as though things were not hard for us at all, but very easy. We are even at pains to die in beauty, and this hypocrisy is held to be the supreme virtue! Under such conditions man cannot, of course, so much as dream of "knowing", and what passes with us for knowledge is only a sort of mimicry by which our temporal, common existence is made as easy and pleasant as possible, or is actually made possible for us at all. What sort of a life would it be if those who feel, like Hamlet, that the times are out of joint, could bring all other men off the rails!

But, I repeat, careful nature, which gave man the "word" "in the beginning" arranged that whatever a man may say, his neighbours' ears only hear what is useful or agreeable to them. Cries, groans, sobs - these men do not hold for the expression of truth, and seek in every way to "eliminate" them: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere. Indeed - men need only the intelligible. That "unintelligible" which is expressed in cries, unrelated tones, or other "external" signs not to be formulated by the word, no longer refers to man. There is perhaps someone who can apprehend more easily tears and groans, even silence, than the word, who perceives more sense in the unspoken than in clear and plain, well-grounded and proved assertions. Philosophy, however - and it was of her that we began to speak - does she listen only for what social man treasures, or to that which strives towards the last "One", towards the Being which knows no needs and therefore does not understand human needs? What did Plato think of this, when he spoke of dying and death, of the flight from life? What did Plotinus think of it when ecstasy bore him into another world, where he even forgot the school, the pupils, and the "knowledge" accumulated by the schools? And is it possible that philosophy should have chosen this watchword for herself: "Non intelligere, sed ridere, lugere, detestari"?

33 - DOSTOEVSKY AND AUGUSTINE

St. Augustine hated the Stoics, Dostoevsky hated the Russian Liberals. At first sight this seems a quite inexplicable peculiarity. Both were convinced Christians, both spoke so much of love, and suddenly - such hate! And against whom? Against the Stoics, who preached self-abnegation, who esteemed virtue above all things in the world, and against the Liberals who also exalted virtue above all thing

s! But the fact remains: Dostoevsky spoke in rage of Stassyulevitch and Gradovsky; Augustine could not be calm when he spoke the names of those pre-Stoic Stoics, Regulus and Mutius Scaevola, and even Socrates, the idol of the ancient world, appeared to him a bogey. Obviously Augustine and Dostoevsky were terrified and appalled by the mere thought of the possibility of such men as Scaevola and Gradovsky - men capable of loving virtue for its own sake, of seeing virtue as an end in itself. Dostoevsky says openly in the Diary of a Writer that the only idea capable of inspiring a man is that of the immortality of the soul.

The word "idea" has the most various meanings: in philosophy the commonest use is that of the Platonic ideas. Dostoevsky, however, used the word in quite a different sense. Theoretic philosophy was completely strange to him, but if he had known Plato as he is generally interpreted today, he would undoubtedly have hated him no less than he hated Gradovsky and Stassyulevitch. According to Plato, Socrates asserts more than once that human ideas remain unchangeable, indifferently whether our soul is mortal or immortal. Dostoevsky, however, assumed - and this is the kernel of his disagreement with the Liberals - that if there is no life after death it is impossible and even senseless to be virtuous. That was why he hated the Liberals, because they tried through their whole lives to prove the opposite. They did not believe in the immortality of the soul, but were prepared to go to the stake and the scaffold for virtue. It is for the same reason that Augustine, too, speaks with such an almost superstitious dislike of the Stoics, and is prepared to forgive them all but their virtues: "virtutes gentium splendida vitia sunt" ("The virtues of the heathens are only splendid vices"). So long as virtue was held to be a ladder, even if a steep and infinitely difficult one, to another and better world, one could let it pass. But if it is sufficient unto itself, if it is pure idea, self-purpose, then it would be better not to live on earth at all. Dostoevsky was obviously not quite convinced that he was right, that the soul was indeed immortal. But he needed precisely this certainty, it was not enough for him to be in possession of the idea of the soul's immortality.

Indeed, to speak truly, the idea of the immortality of the soul is no idea at all. That is, it does not exist in and for itself, one cannot serve it. It must serve itself. If, then, we call justice an idea, it must of course be in quite a different sense from that which Dostoevsky attributed to that word. We can say "pereat mundus, fiat justitia" or "fiat veritas". Justice or truth insist on asserting their rights, whether the world perishes or not - that is not important. Dostoevsky, on the other hand, is trying to equip the poor, lonely, human soul with rights. For him the soul insists at all costs on "being", and enters into strife with other pretenders at being, and especially with idea. Inde ira, or more accurately, the countless irae of both Dostoevsky and St. Augustine. Ideas arrogate to themselves the right to be, while Dostoevsky and Augustine, who are conscientious and impassioned defenders of the "soul", claim this right for themselves. And it is, I think, self-evident to all that it is simply impossible to divide "being" and reconcile the hostile parties with one another. The predicate "being" is indivisible. If it is assigned to the ideas, then souls must renounce immortality; but if to the souls, then the ideas must pass over into the intolerable state of relative or even quite shadowy entity. The will on the one as on the other side is so irresistible, so passionate, that the fight becomes one of life and death. Augustine even preached the forcible conversion of unbelievers, and Dostoevsky was not far removed from it. The whole of positive science, even almost the whole of philosophy, was on the side of the Liberals and the Stoics, so that Dostoevsky and Augustine had no "arguments". Scientists are easily prepared to declare the soul as mortal as, even more mortal than, the body; they are usually quite uninterested in this question; while philosophers, even if they admit anything, admit at the most the idea of the immortality of the soul; that is, they still support the cause of the Liberals, for with them the idea of the immortality of the soul differs in no way from any other idea: it exists for itself alone and only for itself. In other words, one can allow the idea of the immortality of the soul, even were the soul to be mortal.

Augustine and Dostoevsky were men of very fine perceptions, and it was not easy to deceive them. They knew what they wanted and admitted no compromises. They rebelled, grew angry, resisted, overwhelmed their opponents with threats and abuse, did not even shrink from calumny. But what should they have done? They saw that they had and could have no "proofs", that proofs are powerless in the struggle for rights. They remembered the last warning of an old Jew, the Apostle Paul, in whose name they were speaking. The enemy is alert, skillful, cruel, and watchful. If one yields to him all is over. The predicate of being will fall once for all to the ideas, and even to inert matter. It is not arguments and loving readiness for reconciliation that are needful, but belief and the extreme of enmity and hatred. Thus was forged the terrible weapon of the Middle Ages: anathema sit! With this men defended their dearest treasure fifteen centuries long. Now it is grown old, it is no more to be used. What shall one set in its place? Or was Dostoevsky's and Augustine's cause lost, maybe, on the same day when the "anathema sit" fell from their hands?

34 - HISTORIC PERSPECTIVES

The strongest, most untiring of men is capable only of a certain exertion; after that his strength fails him and he is exhausted. It was said of Socrates that he stood motionless on one spot for twenty-four hours in meditation. This already borders on the fantastic, miraculous; even Socrates' strength would not have lasted for forty-eight hours. Man needs to sleep, to rest from exertion, and consequently to interrupt his labour. This one feels in all works of human creation. Everywhere are traces of mosaic work, everywhere are beginnings, continuations, but never an end. The finality which is granted us is only an apparent, external finality, sometimes deceptive, sometimes not even deceptive. Men leave the world after having begun something, often something very important and significant. Where do they complete their beginnings? If historians would ask themselves this question, history would be written differently; if philosophers would ponder it, Hegel's Philosophy of History would not seem to them a revelation.

35 - SELF-INTEREST

We think in order to act, and for that reason our knowledge is something conditional, inadequate, even deceptive. To attain to true perception we must emancipate ourselves from utilitarian ends, not pursue interest, forget action, rather perceive everything disinterestedly. "Disinterestedness" - an old word esteemed by Kant and Schopenhauer. But how to be rid of a habit which the millions of years of human existence has made into second nature? Through conscious thought - but then, interest has produced it. Is it not clear that self-deception would be unavoidable here? Interest will take its share and then force us to hold it for disinterested, for the truth itself. Then one of two things: either the help comes from without, as a gift through chance, through an "event", or we must renounce once for all all other knowledge except such as is limited in its essence by narrow practical purposes. It is true that another supposition is possible: knowledge not only cannot be disinterested, it will not and shall not be. It is possible, that is, that a disinterested creature, a creature which needs nothing, either because it has everything or because it is simply indifferent to everything, has not the peculiarity of possessing knowledge at all. Such a creature is epekeina no§í kai no§Üse§æs (beyond thinking and knowing). In that case our distinction between pure and practical knowledge would be without meaning. We should have to classify knowledge simply after the style and character of the human interests which it represents.

The question would be wherein this interest lies, wherein it sees its profit. For as the Scriptures say: "Where thy treasure is there shall thy heart be also." So long as the "treasure" of man lies in visible and attainable ends - he has a knowledge. As soon as he grows tired of the visible, and the unattainable become

s the object of his whole endeavour, a second knowledge comes in. But why he gets tired of the visible, why the unattainable to which he was formerly indifferent suddenly takes sole possession of him, how such a change is possible and what meaning it has - that is another question, which philosophy discusses with the greater obstinacy the more indubitable the impossibility of any sort of satisfactory answer.

36 - CHANGING VALUES

Had Mozart been born in a poor peasant family, his genius would have been a burden to him and all his kin. He would have been wanted to "work" - and for what "work", from the peasant's point of view, would he have been any use - a sickly, weakly boy, and eternally hankering after music at that? He would have had to live in poverty, hunger, cold, and general contempt, and have died without fame. But if by chance some educated man had seen little Mozart, guessed his true destiny, and taken him out of his peasant surroundings and placed him in those of a gentleman - how suddenly then would his significance have changed; from a petty, useless, despicable boy he would suddenly have become one in universal demand, supreme, incomparable. For our rough, peasant, human work, the Mozarts are not suited. They seem to us idle, dull, vacant. But somewhere under other "conditions", in other surroundings, just they are more indispensable than all others. Somewhere perhaps they are awaited, awaited with impatience. An old maid of whom every one is tired, an irritable, ill-tempered witch like Xanthippe, an unsuccessful pretendant - we want to be rid of them, they tire us. But somewhere else they are awaited. There their "shortcomings" will be advantages. Their lack of occupation, balance, stability, their extreme excitability - everything that bars them from our places of honour - there it will evoke new creative activity and entrance us all. And we shall marvel to learn that there the "chief reward" is reserved for these "last". And how annoyed we shall be at having failed to recognize their gifts here! And how... But enough: for all one's talk one will never convince a peasant that Mozart was a god. Indeed a Mozart himself is not aware of this and would not believe it.

37 - ANAMNESIS

Aristotle says that it is a sign of philosophic boorishness to demand proofs for all assertions. This is hardly to be denied. But one question arises: who decides when one must ask for proofs and when not? The immobility of the earth needed no proofs at one time: it seemed a self-evident truth. The law of contradiction is now claiming privilege of exemption from the obligation of proof. Aristotle even assumes that the law of contradiction is incapable of proof: it is only possible to say that he who rejects it involves himself inevitably in unescapable contradictions. But what of Plato's anamnesis? Are proofs requisite here? It is a fact that nothing can be proved here. When man is born - this I did not learn from Plato - an angel swoops down from heaven and touches with his forefinger his upper lip, whereupon man instantly forgets all that he knew in earlier life. On man's upper lip even a trace of the angel's finger remains behind. If this is indeed true, if the angel descends from heaven with the intention that man should forget his earlier life - how is that to be proved? It can be guessed. One might also assume that the angel sometimes fails to fulfill his duty quite conscientiously, and that man, although forgetting the details of his earlier life, at least retains the recollection that he once lived. And if we shall ask no proofs of him, men will be in possession of a truth far more important and significant than the law of contradiction. But if they demand proofs they will not come into possession of truth.

Now further: men have known how to defend the law of contradiction, but have been unable and unwilling to defend anamnesis. But what a strange thing happened to Kant! The law of contradiction showed itself to him as a hindrance. He himself writes in the famous letter to Garve that it was not meditation on God, etc., th

at awakened him from dogmatic slumber, but the antinomies of reason which he discovered. In other words, he slept, as it is fitting for men to sleep in this life, and could not awaken until he suddenly felt that the law of contradiction was inapplicable even in our earthly life, despite Aristotle's assurances. He awakened, but slept again immediately. Obviously it is man's fate not truly to awaken so long as he lives on earth. From time to time his hard bed and uncomfortable position force him to move, and then he thinks that he awoke, but he only dreams that he awoke. Whether with or without antinomies, whether with or without meditation on God, man cannot conquer the sleep which perpetually overwhelms him. Does there await him a shock which will bring him to the final awakening? Is this shock death? Or must man awake before death, if only for a moment?

Clearly he must - and that usually comes when some truths, unproven and contrary to all our "experience", invade his consciousness, occupy a place there and defend it with an obstinacy which precludes any possibility of argument or battle with them. Then a man does not ask for Aristotle, and ceases to check himself by the approved criteria of truth. He simply knows something new, and knows, too, again despite Aristotle, that the knowledge which can be universally transmitted and taught is far from being the true knowledge. It is necessary, of course. But it is not the really important thing.

38 - PHILOSOPHY'S NEXT TASK

De omnibus dubitandum, taught Descartes - doubt all things. Easily said - but how to do it? Try, for example to doubt that the laws of nature are always binding: one day a case may occur where nature makes an exception for some stone, and exempts it from the law of gravity. But how to find this stone, if one has the courage to admit such a possibility, even if one knew definitely that such a stone existed? Assume that, contrary to the traditional view (which, according to Descartes, is in no wise to be trusted), objects seek the center of the earth, not by natural necessity, but of free will. That, perhaps, they fear loneliness and huddle together like sheep at night. Suppose then, that assuming this, we tried seriously to persuade some lump of wood to refuse henceforward to subject itself to the "laws". Suppose we tried to show it that there was no harm in this, that only good would result if it expressed its own will and transformed itself from a lump of wood into a conscious, animated creature - not after thousands of millions of years, as the theory of evolution might encourage it to hope, but quickly, at once, and not simply into a conscious creature, but into the lord of creation, man, a man of genius, a Plato, a Shakespeare, a Michelangelo. Supposing, if proof is unavailing, we beg, flatter, threaten it. Suppose we decorated it, drew on it human eyes, a golden moustache, a silver beard. This is how artists work; they take an ugly block of stone and hammer into it some noble, divine thought. And the stone begins to speak, almost to breathe - perhaps even to feel. In any case one can often enjoy deeper and more sensible intercourse with such animated stones than with men.

And yet, if some eccentric were to molest a stone with threats, prayers, and arguments, this would profit him as little if he merely appealed to Descartes, to the "de omnibus dubitandum", or to some complicated philosophic argument. Even great services to philosophy in the past would not save him. What is most important: they would fail to save him, not only from his neighbours' wrath, but from his own contempt. What horror of himself would overtake a man if he suddenly caught himself in such an occupation as conversation with an inanimate object! Francis of Assisi, indeed, held dialogues with wolves, birds, and stones. Artists, it is true, allow themselves the same licence, and work miracles. And yet, although through the magic force of reason stones both speak and breathe, the case has not got beyond metaphors. No stone has ever yet dared to refuse demonstratively obedience to the existing order. Is this perhaps because artists have not yet thought of asking for such concessions? Yes, and this is not, perhaps, their business. Disagreeable as it is to lay a new burden on the poor philosopher, yet it is

quite clear that the duty of instigating and inciting dead nature, if it is any one's, is his alone. For who but the philosophers have been preaching slavery and humility with such eloquence, these thousands of years past? And how else are they to make good their great sin?

39 - THE GOLDEN FLEECE

Science sees its task in the discovery of invisible ideal relationships between things; in other words, in explaining what happens in the world. And it is so sunk in its task that it has no interest in "discoveries does not even believe that there can be anything in the world which no one has yet seen or heard. To follow Alexander to India, to sail after Columbus into the West, or - if one may be pardoned for saying it - to sail with the Argonauts to Colchis in quest of the golden fleece, or to journey with the Jews to the promised land; to speak of such tasks today even in jest, seems improper to a scientist, still more to a philosopher. What Colchis, what promised lands can there be? These are all hopes of men of old and of uneducated people. But in three thousand years' time we shall seem to our posterity no less out-moded and no less uneducated than the Jews and the Argonauts do to us. And in thirty thousand years' time - if the world is still going on - it may turn out that the hopes and premonitions of the men of old were nearer to the truth than our learned generalizations.

40 - THE TRUTH AND THE GOOD

Spinoza says in his Ethics (IV, lxiii): "Si homines liberi nascerentur, nullum boni et mali formarent conceptum, quamdiu liberi essent." This is a great truth, already enunciated in the Scriptures by the Prophet Isaiah, and by St. Paul, but not accepted by human wisdom. Indeed, were man born free, he would have no conception of good and evil. Unfortunately, Spinoza weakens the significance of his words by recalling immediately after: "illum liberum esse, qui sola ducitur ratione." But he should have followed the Bible to the end, and added again: "Si homines liberi nascerentur, nullum veri et falsi conceptum formarent" (that if man were born free, he would find the distinction between truth and lies as unnecessary as that between good and evil). This means that a being free from the limitations imposed on us in virtue of the peculiar conditions of life on earth (let me again recall the Biblical legend of the Fall - the teaching of Isaiah and St. Paul is simply the interpretation of this legend) would not even guess that truth and lies exist, as it would not guess that good and evil exist. Or more accurately: there would be neither lies nor evil, and consequently neither truth nor good. Obviously Plato was of the same mind when he said, the§æn oude§às philosophe§à oud' epithume§à sophos genesthai : esti gar (none of the gods philosophizes or strives to be wise; for they are wise already).

And indeed, the gods do not philosophize or strive after wisdom. Not, indeed, that they are wise already, but because they have no need of many things, such as money, arms, shelter, etc. - without which we cannot exist. They have no need to distinguish between good and evil; for the gods everything is good. It would be nonsensical, too, to say of God that "sola ducitur ratione"("He is guided by reason alone"). For Him there are neither moral sanctions nor reasons, He does not need, as mortals do, a reason, a support, a firm ground. Groundlessness is the basic, most enviable, and to us most incomprehensible privilege of the Divine. Consequently, our whole moral struggle, even as our rational inquiry - if we once admit that God is the last end of our endeavours - will bring us sooner or later (rather later, much later, than sooner) to emancipation not only from moral valuations, but also from reason's eternal truths. Truth and the Good are fruits of the forbidden tree; for limited creatures, for outcasts from paradise. I know that this ideal of freedom in relation to truth and the good cannot be realized on earth - in all probability does not even need to be realized. But it is granted to man to have prescience of ultimate freedom. Before the face of Eternal God all our foundations break together and all ground crumbles under us, even as ob

jects - this we know - lose their weight in endless space, and - this we shall probably learn one day - will lose their impermeability in endless time. Not so long ago weight seemed to man an inseparable attribute of things, even as impermeability.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio Index ToC

In Job's Balances \ Part II \ Revolt and Submission

<< | >>

41 - OUT OF THE BOOK OF FATE

In eternity, in the boundlessness of time and space, our conscious, living entity undergoes immense changes and becomes quite different from what it was under the conditions of limited earthly being. Much drops away, much is added. What seemed most important becomes of secondary importance, or loses its significance, and conversely, that which had no significance comes into the foreground. Now it seems to us a small matter if we chance to crush an ant under our foot, or save a cockchafer that has fallen into the water, but it seems immensely important that Germany was defeated in the "World War". But from another angle of vision it might appear that the crushed ant or the rescued beetle was far more important than the great civilized country. That seems a paradox? Yes, indeed! But has there never been anything of the sort on earth? And then: the endless past, the endless, quite unknown future and the "known" but wholly elusive present hemmed in between two eternities - is that no paradox? How na§áve to require intelligibility of metaphysical conjectures! Unintelligibility is their basic characteristic. And for that reason we naturally do not know what we should keep against eternity and what eliminate. We are recommended to eliminate "sensuousness" and keep ideas. I think that the matter is much more complicated than people think, and precisely in connection with this commonplace of philosophy I shall permit myself to recommend Descartes' rule, "de omnibus dubitandum" - the more so as Descartes doubted absolutely everything - except this sentence.

42 - METAPHYSICAL TRUTHS

Aristotle is alleged not to have understood Plato. How could this be? We who live twenty-five hundred years after Plato, and know his thoughts only from his works, on the authority and chronological sequence of which we have no exact information, and which are written in a dead language, strange to us - we understand Plato, while Aristotle, his contemporary, friend, and disciple, who sat for 18 years "at the feet" of his master - did not understand him! It is clear that he did not "understand" Plato's teaching; he did not accept it, because he felt in it something absolutely hostile. What the teacher hailed joyfully as glad tidings seemed to the pupil temptation of the devil. Aristotle rejected Plato's "Ideas" principally because he saw in them an unnecessary duplication of the world. But what was unnecessary to Aristotle seemed to Plato the supreme necessity, the supremely important and essential, to timi§ætaton, for whose sake both he and all his true disciples went to philosophy. The world must be duplicated, precisely duplicated: beside the visible and natural world, in which brute force is ensured its triumph and Anytus and Meletus are victors, there is another, super-natural world to be found, wherein Socrates is the wisest, and the wisest is the strongest. Only so would Plato have been justified in esteeming as truth what Socrates said to his judges: "Ye, too, O judges, should believe in the goodness of death and be impregnated with that ultimate truth that no evil can befall a good man, eith

er in life or after his death, and that the gods never forget him" (Apology, XXXIII). This is the basis and the root of Plato's teaching. No evil can befall a good man (ouk estin andri agath§æi kakon ouden).

It is quite clear that in Aristotle's "real" world Socrates' words are lies and empty chatter, for which, as he was evidently often told, a flogging would be too mild a punishment. Only if, beside the world directly accessible to all, there was another world, and that the supremely important and only real world - only then could Socrates speak to his judges as he did without hypocrisy. Aristotle was shocked. Unnecessary duplication! To the one it seemed necessary, to the other unnecessary. Aristotle was not troubled about Socrates' fate. His care was elsewhere, and his mission upon earth a different one, for by nature's mysterious decree he was predestined to another metaphysical fate than Plato and Socrates. This is perhaps a particularly clear illustration of the faultiness of the Platonic-Socratic teaching of general conceptions. General conceptions are not an ally to metaphysics, but its most dangerous and treacherous enemy.

To try to group Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle under the single conception "man" would be to annihilate all metaphysics. For then all Aristotle's objections to Plato would be correct, and so would his definition of truth. To overcome Aristotle, we must first and foremost destroy the conception "man", and afterwards a whole series of other general conceptions: reason, good, truth, etc. It is impossible to speak of "man" generally, so long as the metaphysical destinies of individual men are different, so long as one is destined for the empiric world, the other for the ideal, etc. There is a Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and Alexander's groom, but each of these differs from the other far more strongly than he does from a rhinoceros, a peacock, a cypress, or a cabbage; perhaps even from a tree trunk or a rock. If metaphysics is possible, and in so far as it is possible, it has always drawn its "wisdom" from such "visions" - although never admitting it and rarely realizing it. The Platos duplicate reality, and the second reality is for them the true one. The Aristotles want no second reality - and so for them it transforms itself into a chimera, into something "superfluous".

43 - THE IRRATIONAL RESIDUE OF BEING

The irrational residue of being, which has disquieted philosophers from the earliest times of the awakening of human thought and which men have striven so passionately and so fruitlessly to "apprehend" i.e. to resolve into elements congruous to our reason - must that really be the cause of so much fear, so much hostility and hatred? Reality cannot be deduced from reason, reality is greater, much greater than reason - is that such a misfortune? Why do men see in it a misfortune? If we had found a deficit in the balance-sheet of the world's structure, that would be different. That would mean that someone was robbing us secretly and robbing us perhaps of something very valuable and important to us. But the final balance-sheet has shown a certain "residue", a "surplus", and a substantial one at that! We have discovered an invisible and generous benefactor, and one who is considerably more powerful than human reason. We have this generous benefactor and - in so far as we seek for "knowledge" - we are anxious at any price to be rid of him! Even in metaphysics we strive for a "natural" explanation: there is to be no benefactor. Why? Out of pride? Or out of suspicion? "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes?" We fear that although he is a benefactor and makes us gifts, in the end he will turn into an enemy and a robber and take all from us. Can we believe no one, trust no one except ourselves?

There is no doubt that mistrust and suspicion of our understanding are the chief sources of rationalism. If the benefactor were always benevolent, always gave gifts, then there would be no rationalists, and also no skeptics, who are blood-brothers of the rationalists. Men would then no longer trouble about methodologies and about criticism of the power of judgment, they would hymn the beauty of the world and the might of the creator in confidence and joy. Instead of tracts "D

e intellectus emendatione" and investigations about method, we should have psalms, like the old Jews who had not yet learned to reckon and examine. We today understand how to reckon, and have learned how to think also. We say: the giver is also a taker. Even with the Greeks the chief theme of philosophic contemplation was genesis and phthora - birth and destruction. A creator has made things, has given them a beginning - but as experience teaches, everything that has a beginning has also an end, and a wretched, bitter, lamentable end at that. With the Greeks the thought appears even in the pre-philosophic period that it would be best for men not to be born at all. It is better not to live at all than to live and be destined to inescapable destruction. And if some power has cast us unasked into the world, then the best thing left to us is to die as quickly as possible. Our life, that eternal hesitation between being and not being, cannot possibly have any value...

Experience has shown that all that has a beginning also comes to an end. Reason, which is convinced that it knows even more than experience tells it, sets up a veritas aeterna: all that arises cannot help finishing, all that has a beginning cannot help having an end. Consequently, concludes reason with self-assurance, gifts of any kind, precisely because they are gifts and were not there before, will inevitably be taken away again. They are given us only on loan; we have but the usufruct of them. The only thing left to us to do is to refuse gifts and giver alike. The gifts are bad because they are taken away again, and also the giver is bad because he takes away. Good alone is that which is won by our own strength, which is not given us but made our own through the "nature of things", i.e. through someone who cannot voluntarily either give or take away because, metaphorically speaking, he has no "hands". This is probably why Plotinus falls with such rage on the Gnostics in the last book of his second Ennead. They had discovered his own secret thought, but with much greater clarity and sequence than he would have wished. In other words, they were much more consistent, not only inwardly but also outwardly. Neither with Plotinus nor with Plato did "flight from the world" mean rejection of the world. Plotinus, of course, found many things repulsive here on earth, and there were many things of which he wished passionately to be rid. But there was also something which he would not have renounced at any price, even if he had had to promote matter a step and allow it a certain being. Much as Plotinus speaks of the nothingness of sensuous apperceptions, much as he tries to prove that "beauty" is better than beautiful objects - for objects appear and disappear but beauty is eternal - yet he was furious when the Gnostics proposed complete renunciation of the world. This world, our visible, sensuously perceptible world, which is corrupted by the addition of the non-existent, false, dark, and evil element of matter, this world is yet wonderfully beautiful; and although, like all "sensuous" things, it is subject to change and consequently must have had a beginning and be doomed to an end, yet Plotinus will not give it up and does not even hesitate to declare it eternal and to pillory the Gnostics, who despise the world and its creator...

But, we ask, in whose name is such a fearful warfare waged? In the name of objective truth? But neither Plotinus nor the Gnostics, of course, knew certainly whether the world was eternal or whether it arose in time and would be destroyed again. They had no "proofs" - they lacked even those empirical data which have been acquired by modern geology and paleontology and on which modern science builds up its "history of the world". But this lack of proofs no more prevented Plotinus from putting forward his own opinion than it prevented the Gnostics from standing by their own. For the Gnostics, "evil" in the world enhances beauty, and they thought: May the world perish if only the arch-evil which was intruded into it by the clumsiness of the Demiurge who created it perishes together with it. Plotinus, on the other hand, who was completely absorbed in the contemplation of the beauty of the world, said: Let us rather allow an inconsistency of thought and permit the forbidden sensuous to creep into the world again, so long as we need not give up this glorious heaven, the divine stars and the lovely sea. For although they are apperceived by the senses - without eyes one can see nothing of a

ll this; for although "absolute beauty" should be better than the beauty of the earth, the sky, and the sea, yet without this concrete, "single" beauty, the world is no world. Such beauty must be eternal and imperishable.

And evil? Before evil one can flee, withdraw into oneself; one can, after all, put up with something on this earth where there is so much beauty. And then one can think oneself out a theodicy against evil which can scare away all human misfortune, however great. Even the moral "evil" can be explained, if one permits a barely perceptible inconsistency, which even an expert in philosophy would not notice. The main thing is not to abandon the beauty of the world, not to give it up under any circumstances. Here is the important difference between Plotinus and the Gnostics. Plotinus accepted gladly both gifts and giver, although, in obedience to Hellenic philosophic traditions, he was anxious to limit and bind the world-creator in every way and to represent him as giving "necessarily" or "naturally". In other words, he retained in theory the right of control and the greatest possible independence for himself and his reason. The Gnostics, on the other hand, being clearly more impressed by the terrors than the beauties of earth, resolved to reject all that is earthly, hoping that somewhere, in another place, they would find both the imperishable gifts and the perfect Demiurge. But here on earth men lived only to fight tirelessly against death. It is obvious that the Gnostics were more consistent.

Does this mean that they were nearer the truth? Not at all. It is fairly certain that neither the Gnostics nor Plotinus approached the truth. It is probably correct that the truth has little relation to what men like the Gnostics or Plotinus taught. Consequently they had no reason to dispute, although each of them was talking and doing on his own lines, which were quite different. Neither the Gnostics' world-renunciation nor Plotinus's world affirmation has a right to assume the name of truth and sail under its flag. Then was their dispute superfluous? If one likes to say it, they never disputed at all, and would de facto have got on perfectly well together, if tireless reason had not dragged them quite unnecessarily before the court and confronted them with one another. When there is judgment, when it is stated in advance that either condemnation or acquittal must result, one begins, of course, involuntarily to find defence and proofs of innocence, even to squabble and scratch. But is it, I ask, so absolutely necessary to run to the judge? Does the evening star strive with the lightning flash for beauty? Or the cypress with the palm? I think that Plotinus and the Gnostics only went to court "here". "There" it would not have occurred to any one to raise the question of their "rightness". The Gnostics were right when in their search for justification and compensation for the tortures of the world they forgot the beauty of the world, and Plotinus was right also when in his enthusiasm for the beauty of the world he forgot the evil that lies here. We, their distant descendants and followers, who listen in the night for the voice of men who left our earthly vale of tears more than fifteen hundred years ago, we hear both their laments and their songs of praise and only wonder how it could be that the intensive creative activity of these illustrious men could remain so entirely without influence on our modern science. Science does not trouble itself with what went on in the souls of these men. Science does not even know that they had "souls". All their "better", "worse", "for nothing in the world" and "at all costs" will not outweigh in the balances of science a pound, an ounce, a grain of ordinary sand or even dirt. All that is the "irrational residue" which is subject to no investigation.

44 - THE IDEA OF CHAOS

The idea of chaos terrifies man, for it is assumed for some reason that in chaos, in the absence of order, he cannot live. In other words, we imagine, not chaos, but a cosmos which from our point of view is not quite successful, a certain degree of order, in fact, which excludes the possibility of life. So integral a part of our spiritual structure has the idea of order become. In reality chaos is

a lack of any order, and consequently also of that order which excludes the possibility of life. Chaos is no limited possibility, but the direct opposite, an unlimited possibility. To grasp and admit absolute freedom is infinitely hard for us, as it is hard for a man who has always lived in darkness to look into the light. But this is obviously no objection, the more so as in life, the life which arose on our earth, where order prevails, there are difficulties which are far greater, simply unacceptable. He who knows these difficulties will not shrink from trying his luck with the idea of chaos. And he will perhaps convince himself that the evil comes, not from chaos but from cosmos, that cosmos is the source also of all those "necessities" and "impossibilities" which transform our world into a vale of tears and lamentations.

45 - THE SOURCES OF KNOWLEDGE

Flashes of thought, sudden inspiration on the one hand, and thought-out thoughts on the other, brought into relationship with the past and serving as basis for future thoughts - which of these shall one believe? If Eros is the source of the supreme cognition, then, of course, the former. The ancients believed in inspiration; it was only the men of today who took their stand on positive knowledge and required uniformity of knowledge. Plato's theory of ideas is theory only in the name. It is only loosely related to his ultimate apperceptions, and myths are always nearer to him than the "conclusions of reason" which we persist in requiring of him. It would be more true to say that with him dialectic is dominated by the mythical; in any case it is for him altogether an end to itself. Plato rejoices in the music of ideas which he catches, he treasures ideas in proportion as they produce for him their strange and ravishing - if imperceptible to others' ears - harmony. Thus ideas delight him, quite irrespective of whether they correspond to reality or not. The "love-lorn philosopher" troubles little whether or no other men share his delight in the beauty which he has discovered. He is in love. His love is final aim and self-justification. Indeed, is anything more necessary? If Eros justifies all this, does he need to justify himself before others? He has "shone forth", has done marvelous things - he has no other care. Indeed, he has no care at all. His task lies in wrenching man free from the troublesomeness of everyday existence. When once Eros arrives, all limitations, all conventions, all "works" have an end, the holiday begins on which one may do what is forbidden on ordinary days, for one is allowed not to work, not to earn, but simply to "take", because restraints, laws, arrangements, regulations, automatically drop away.

That last word in Plato's sense was to be spoken by Plotinus 700 years later. Monos pros monon - man face to face with God, beyond and above all that bound him, above even knowledge, or if you will, first and foremost above knowledge; for what limits more than knowledge? Only "there", in the blending with God, is freedom, there is truth, there is the holiest aim of all our endeavour. And this blending is rapture, is "delight " - in contrast to knowledge, it is that which is most direct, most sudden in life, that which least fits into the usual categories of understanding, whose task is to transform even divine inspirations into quod semper ubique et ab omnibus creditum est - that which is always and everywhere believed of all.

46 - A QUESTION

Insight, especially when new and unexpected, usually brings great joy in its train. It is, as it were, a reward for the virtues of indefatigability and boldness. But there are men to whom joys are denied. Is it also denied to such men to attain insight, to make discoveries? One cannot cognize without rejoicing, as a hungry man cannot eat without feeling pleasure. Ascetics have not infrequently renounced eating because they could not eat "dispassionately". Must those who have taken the vow of joylessness cease to think, to seek and to see, and only wait, senseless, dull, indifferent? Or are spiritual joys always permitted, even to th

ose who have taken a vow? That it is sometimes impossible, not only for an individual, but also for a whole people, not to take a vow of joylessness - I think this is now very widely understood. The Jews have mourned for thousands of years over ruined Jerusalem, and now the Russians mourn for Russia. And they care for no vision, consequently no vision is possible. It is only later perhaps, in the far future, that the long-stored energy will flame up as a lurid flame of "revelation".

47 - SURFACES AND DEPTHS

Plotinus's ecstasy is the last flaming up of the Hellenic spirit, which is now capable only with difficulty and by dint of great spiritual exertion of "remembering" the witness borne by the men of old and the saints who dwelt near to the gods. Aristotle did everything to eliminate from the souls of men the traces of anamnesis of an earlier life. And then nothing more availed. For all the efforts of mediaeval Catholicism, the truth of antiquity fell ever deeper into oblivion. No one would, or could, believe that men had once dwelt nearer to the gods. The new philosophy begins with Spinoza, who broke openly with antiquity. Our forefathers, he said, had never dwelt near to the gods. And there never were gods. Man must make unto himself a god: amor dei intellectualis. And men did not go beyond Spinoza. today even Spinoza, that weak reflection of Plotinus, who only in rare moments of artificial §Ûlan reached something like that "union" which sufficed to make the men of antiquity happy - even he seems to us over-mystical. Gods, demons and spirits are dead - the world has peopled itself with all sorts of principles and rules, which are universally thought the most or even the sole legitimate successors of the earlier fantastic beings. The ancients, we think, were mistaken. They saw what leapt to the eye, what lay on the surface, and took what they saw for a god. But principles and general rules lie hidden in the depths, are invisible, hard. to find. Meanwhile, only what is won with labour can be true and beautiful; all life is proof and guarantee of this...

But sometimes one feels doubts of even the most self-evident theses. Perhaps what is best and most necessary lies not in the depths but on the surface, and must be given to man not hardly but easily. What is won with labour, through culture, battle, endeavour, however we may treasure it, is yet as nothing in comparison with what was given us of itself, without effort, what we received from God as a gift. Our curse is that now we can only believe in what we won in the sweat of our brow and bore in travail. It is certain that the punishment must be accepted, cannot be evaded. But when the probationary period is over - then the depths will be forgotten and Maya will enter again into all those rights which the devil - who is none other than reason - took from her through God's counsel, by leading man away from the lucent surface of being to the dark roots and principles.

48 - THE WAY TO THE TRUTH

"I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint. My heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of my bowels" (Psalm xxii, 14). To glimpse the truth one needs not only a keen eye, ingenuity, watchfulness, etc.; one must also have the capacity of supreme self-abnegation, and that not quite in the ordinary sense. It is not enough for man to declare himself ready to live in filth and cold, to endure injury and sickness, to be burned in the brazen bull of the tyrant Phalaris. That is needed of which the Psalmist sings: to melt inwardly, to shatter the skeleton of one's own soul and to break that which is held to be the basis of our being, all that ready certainty and clear-cut definition of conception in which we are accustomed to see the veritates aeternae. We must feel that all in us has become fluid, that forms are not laid down in advance through an eternal law, but that man must create for himself every hour, every moment.

For thousands of years human thought has worked tirelessly at determining and laying fast the eternal as something always the same and immutable. Socrates went

to the craftsmen, the artisans, to learn this art. Smith, joiner, carpenter, cook, doctor - they know what they have to do, they have a conception of the "good", a ready-made, fixed causa finalis which is determined through their work. From them we too can learn what is the "Good", for the "Good" is always and everywhere one and the same. But the "Good" of the gods which Socrates needed has not the least resemblance to the "Good" of the smiths, carpenters, and doctors. Only the name is the same. The gods know no "craft" and need none. They seek neither firmness, nor durability, nor laws. There is a conception of a table or a hoof. But there is no conception of the "Good"; the smiths and the carpenters have to do their work and confine themselves to their work. Even as their tools, axes, hammers, saws, etc., are not needed by the philosopher and cannot help him, so also their ideas and methods will give nothing to him whom Apollo has called to his holy sacrifice. In transferring the conception of "law" and the "general conception" from everyday life into science, Socrates gave science much, yet condemned metaphysics to a slow and certain death. The Critique of Pure Reason was born in that hour when Socrates determined to seek the "Good" among the craftsmen.

Metaphysics became a craft. And so our task - perhaps an impossible one, for Socrates has become second nature to us - should consist in eliminating from our souls all that is "lawful" and "ideal". It consists, in the Psalmist's image, in shattering the skeleton which lends substance to our old ego, melting the "heart in our bowels". Laws and firmness exist only on earth, for temporal existence. The "ideal", whether causa efficiens or causa finalis, is also only on earth. Beyond temporal existence man must create for himself both causes and aims. And to learn this, man must experience that dreadful feeling of desolation of which the Twenty-second Psalm speaks in its opening words: "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me!" There is no God, man is abandoned to himself and himself alone. There is not even the hope with which Socrates sometimes consoled himself that death is a sleep without dream-faces. No - visions will haunt the sleep. And the chief vision is: God is not, man must himself become God, create all things out of nothing; all things; matter together with forms, and even the eternal laws.

That is the experience of the men of antiquity, of the Saints: away from knowledge, from firm ground, from the certainties, from all that is given to man through "general" life! Herein lies their "great" hope! And not only the ancients, but also men nearer to our times have known much about this and testified to it in their writings. Irreconcilable enemies, Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and Luther the renegade monk, both teach that only a man who has gone astray in eternity and is abandoned to himself and to immeasurable despair is capable of directing his eyes on ultimate truth. Hence Luther's enigmatic words in his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans: "Blasphemiae... aliquanto sonant gratiores in aure Dei quam ipsum Alleluja vel quaecumque laudis jubilatio. Quanto enim horribilior et foedior est blasphemia, tanto est Deo gratior." ("Blasphemy sometimes sounds in God's ears more agreeable than even Hallelujah or any solemn hymn of praise. And the more frightful and repulsive the blasphemy, the more agreeable it is to God.") The meaning of one of the truths of Ignatius Loyola's Exercitia spiritualia is the same: "Quanto se magis repent anima segregatam ac solitariam, tanto aptiorem se ipsam reddit ad quaerendum attingendumque creatorem et dominum suum." ("The more secluded and solitary the soul feels itself, the fitter does it make itself to seek and attain its Lord and Creator.")

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio Index ToC

In Job's Balances \ Part II \ Revolt and Submission

<< | >>

49 - SOLA FIDE

Plato called time a moving image of eternity. It might be more correct to say: eternity is an unmoving image of time. Philosophers have always looked on time as their enemy, and it is the dream of all metaphysicians to overcome time, in which, with matter, we commonly see the source of evil. Time devours its own children - so we are taught; from time come instability, mutability, lability, and from time also, destruction. And he who would fight against destruction and death aims at overcoming time and the mutability which proceeds from it. At the same time, indeed, we fight also against "matter"; although matter is in itself inertia, i.e. the direct opposite of mutability and instability. If matter were alone in the world, everything, always, would be like itself, there would be no changes and consequently also no destruction. But the material world is death itself! From such a comparison of the immutability of matter and the instability of forms, it should follow that time is no enemy, but an ally of the living man, and alone gives him a hope of the possibility of escaping the might of dead matter. And that the true enemy of man, the symbol and incarnation of death, is eternity, the absence of time. For that reason the basic predicate of matter is eternity and immutability. Time came to the world together with the human soul, eluding the watchfulness of eternity, which guarded it jealously, and together with the soul it declared war on inertia. So that one can perhaps rightly see in time the beginning of all genesis (birth), but in no circumstances may one couple phthora (destruction) with time, as the ancients did. Time only creates the possibility of changes and great transformations. Destruction, however, does not come from time. And if time is as mighty as it appears to the empirical consciousness, then humanity's supreme hopes must be bound up with its might. In the beginning was immovable eternity and its brother death. When time came, having escaped the fetters of inertia and immutability, with it came life. And since that day life and death fight against one another in the world.

Which is the final victor? There is in any case no ground for saying that death is victorious. So far, at least, death has not succeeded in driving life from the world. It often seems as though death and eternity, like matter, have already made important concessions to time, even abdicated their sovereign rights. It seems as though eternity, and death, and matter were turning gradually from substance into accidents, from kings who autocratically lay down the law to being into yielding, conciliatory leaders. Already Plato suspected in matter the "not being"; Aristotle saw in it only the potential being; Plotinus a futile, wretched, weak ghost. Indeed, matter is most like a ghost, and it seems as though it were not real even in our empirical being, as though it did not bind the living man. It only serves him; whether his temporal or metaphysical needs, I know not: perhaps both. It was not for nothing that Plotinus finally resolved to take it with him into yonder world, where it is already no longer the source of evil, but of good. Obviously as soon as we part matter from the idea of "necessity" it will at once be clear that it contains not only evil but also good.

Still more can one say this of forms. Even here, in the empiric world, we convince ourselves that forms are not altogether subject to the law or laws of necessity. The whole glory and beauty of forms is very largely rooted in their capability of passing from one to another. An ugly block of stone transforms itself under our eyes into a beautiful statue. Even ugly men, we are forced to think, may become beautiful - but this is of course much more complicated and difficult, and human art has not succeeded, or only to a very small degree, in achieving the miracle of such transformations. But obviously art is in a position to guess at the possibility of it. This is precisely the starting-point of Plotinus's theory of ideas, and on it he constructs his philosophy of awakening. Plato does not hold our world for real. Plotinus strives vehemently to pass the frontiers of the empiric - his ekstasis (ecstasy) is an attempt to awaken here on earth from the

auto-suggestions, to dispel the eternal magic which, embodied in the form of "self-evident truths", paralyzes the understanding and the will of the boldest man. This is precisely the famous "flight from life". And strangely enough, neither in Plotinus nor in Plato does the flight from life at all presuppose hatred or contempt of the world.

How vexed Plotinus was over the teaching of the Gnostics! Plotinus does not despise the world, he loves it with his whole heart - he who, following Plato's example, ever repeats that death is better than life. This "glaring contradiction" (and it is far from being the only one: the whole philosophy both of Plato and of Plotinus consists of glaring contradictions which are carefully hidden from the uninitiated, but no less carefully preserved quite inviolate) is not to be removed from Plotinus's philosophy, which would then lose its soul and life. The fundamental error of most, indeed of almost all, studies on Plotinus, lies in the fact that their authors usually try to tone down the contradictions which they find in him by explanations and commentaries, or to eliminate them by their own additions and emendations. This method is absolutely impermissible... When Eduard von Hartman, who believes himself a kindred spirit of Plotinus and is held by others to be such, attempts, simply in order to eliminate the contradictions which he has remarked, to replace Plotinus's "One" through the conception of "substance" coined by Spinoza, meanwhile transforming "reason" and the "world-soul" into an attribute of thought and will, he is simply concealing the true Plotinus from himself and others. He does this with a perfectly easy conscience, being convinced that philosophy is "common action" and that the series of philosophers who followed Plotinus had added to what they inherited much which Plotinus himself would not reject if one could recall his spirit to earth. Whence comes this conviction? Philosophy is no common action and cannot be so, as it cannot be science in the ordinary sense of the word.

This is especially true of Plotinus's philosophy. Plotinus cannot be supplemented out of Spinoza, Schelling, Schopenhauer, or Hegel. Plotinus cannot be supplemented at all. He can only be heard and, so far as possible, felt. It is not even possible to submit him to a critique in that part of his Meditations in which he touches on truly philosophic questions. We are, of course, not bound to accept his physics and astronomy. His knowledge in the field of positive science is naturally small in comparison with ours. But philosophy - that we seek from him, and he again sought it from men who lived before him and were even less instructed than he. Both he and Plato were deeply convinced that the ancients were "better" than they and nearer to the gods...

Is that right? Must we also assume that Plotinus, who lived so long ago, was better than we and - the main point - nearer to the gods and consequently to the sources of ultimate truth? A question of fundamental importance, which the present day unfortunately does not dare pose, much less solve. We today take the history of philosophy for the fundamental science - fundamental not only for historians, but also for philosophers. The physicist or botanist does not find it necessary to study the history of physics or botany; even if he interests himself in the history of his science it is only by the way. But in philosophy, not even those who believe in the progress of philosophic thought will confine themselves to acquaintance with the modern authors. We need Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus no less than Kant or Hegel. Indeed, even more; one can get along without modern philosophers, such as Wundt or Spencer, but not without Plato or Plotinus. Ancient philosophers, for all their backwardness and, indeed, their ignorance in the field of positive science, are for us eternal and irreplaceable teachers. Similarly, in the field of art the present does not allow the modern poets any advance over Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus or even Horace or Virgil. Dante and Schopenhauer delight us more than Hugo and Musset. And this can be said more truly of religion. The Bible remains the book of books, the eternal book. It would be no loss to exchange the theological literature of a whole generation of later epochs against a single Epistle of St. Paul or a chapter from Isaiah.

This is certainly no chance. The sciences develop and perfect themselves. Positive knowledge accumulates, transmits itself. For that reason each successive generation is more learned than its predecessor. Aristotle is right; a characteristic of knowledge is that it can be transmitted to any man. But in philosophy, art and religion, the case is quite different. The "knowledge of the philosopher, the artist, the prophet, does not enter into man's everyday life as an article of use. For Plato his anamnesis, his "ideas", his "Eros" were knowledge, supreme philosophical knowledge. But even Aristotle "refuted" him. Even today all this knowledge can be drawn from Plato's own works alone, while those theses of the old physics or mechanics which have proved correct are reproduced in any textbook, without even an indication by whom and when they were given to humanity. If we speak of Pythagoras's theorem, Archimedes' level, or even of Newton's laws, it is only for the sake of simplicity and brevity. It is quite different when one speaks of Plato's ideas, of Plotinus's "One", of Aristotle's Entelechy, of Spinoza's amor intellectualis, or even of Kant's postulates. Here the creator is as important as his work. Just as it is impossible to describe or retell in one's own words Phidias or Praxiteles, Leonardo da Vinci or Raphael, Sophocles or Shakespeare. One must oneself see or read their works. Not to speak of the Psalms, the Books of the Prophets, the Epistles of the Apostles; unless one has read them, if one only knows them from the words of others, one cannot even guess what they say. It is true that even those who have read them often do not understand and appreciate them. The fact probably is that, however we strain our imaginations, we yet cannot penetrate into the distant past. And the more distant the past, the more difficult it is to reconstruct it by means of the ordinary historical methods.

One should not deceive oneself and trust too much any one's ability to read the history of the earth, of life, of men, of peoples, from the material traces which have remained behind. There is every reason to suppose that we "read" badly, very badly, and that our bad reading has provided us with a considerable store of false ideas and knowledge. We always read" starting from the presupposition that there is and can be nothing new under the sun, a presupposition that is obviously quite false and entirely unfounded; there is new under the sun, but we lack eyes to recognize it - we only understand how to see the old. The Biblical legend of Adam's fall, for example, is something new. If we examine it as historians should, as men should who seek a natural relationship between phenomena and are convinced a priori that they can find nothing in the darkness of the centuries which does not also exist in our days, we shall be forced either to interpret it wrongly or to hold it for a later, even for a very late interpolation. This would be absurd. The legend of the Fall is so closely bound up with the whole Biblical story that we should be obliged to attribute the whole of Genesis, and consequently, all other books of the Bible, to an epoch near our own. But what then? How can one explain naturally how a little, uneducated, nomad people could come upon the idea that the supreme sin which deformed human nature and brought with it the expulsion from paradise, with all the consequences of that expulsion: our heavy, tortured life, labour in the sweat of our brows, sickness, death, etc. - that the supreme sin of our forefathers was trust in "reason"? and that man in plucking the apple from the tree of knowledge did not save himself as one would suppose, but damned himself for ever?

How, I ask, could such a thought come into the heads of primitive herdsmen who were obliged to devote all their time and forces to the "struggle for existence", i.e. to tending their cows and sheep? What acuteness and refinement of understanding, what culture is necessary even to approach this fateful question! Even today very learned men abstain from such torturing problems, feeling that it is seldom or never granted to man to solve them, or even to grasp them in their whole depth and complexity. One might say more: although the Bible has been for centuries the most widely read book of European humanity and each of its words is held holy, yet the most highly educated and deepest thinkers have never understood

the legend of the Fall. Even today none of us understands the riddles hidden in it; we are organically incapable of understanding it. Why is the tree of knowledge the tree of death, while the tree of life gives no knowledge? Our whole experience proves the opposite. Knowledge protects life, enables man - a weak animal without natural weapons - to fight with other animals dangerous to him. Knowledge is the source of our force and might... So it would seem! But if we do not understand the legend of the Fall - how then could uneducated, rude herdsmen understand - much less invent - it.

It is clear that they could neither understand nor invent it; just as they could obviously not come to the conclusion from the visible traces which remained behind that there once had been a flood. The legend of the Fall came to the Jews from somewhere outside, they received it as "a tradition and then it was transmitted from generation to generation. Consequently, its origin must be ascribed to a very remote period of human history. Yet however far back into the darkness of time we remove the legend of the fatal tree, we are not facilitating our task, but rather complicating it more than ever. The forefathers of the Jews who lived in Palestine were even less educated than they; they were quite primitive men, savages. Were they capable of reflecting about such problems at all, far less of solving them? Were they able to contrast life and knowledge?... I repeat that the most highly educated man, even today, could not make such a contrast "with his own reason". When Nietzsche brought back his Beyond Good and Evil from his subterranean and super-terranean wanderings, the world was dumbfounded, as though it had never seen its like before. And that although he was only repeating once again the immemorial legend of the trees which grew in paradise. And that although the story had already been told with such passion and fire by the Prophet Isaiah, by St. Paul, who based himself on the Prophets, and even by Luther, who filled the world with his thunder - Luther, who taught that man is saved, not by works, but by faith alone - sola fide - and that he who trusts in his good works is condemned to everlasting death.

If, then, although the prophets, apostles, and philosophers proclaimed this truth to us so often, we could not and cannot grasp it, how could the Jews invent it for themselves? Obviously they could not. It is equally obvious that they could not have taken it over from any one else. Then whence came it to them? And if it came to them in "natural" wise, why are we, even today, unable to guess its mysterious meaning? Why does it appear, if not exactly false, yet utterly senseless, even to those who look on the Bible as a book of revelation?

It cannot be - so our reason, our whole spiritual being, repeats ever and again - that death came of knowledge. This would mean that man could only free himself from death if he freed himself from knowledge, and lost the power to distinguish good from evil! This was "revealed" to our remote forefathers, and they preserved the truth revealed to them through thousands of years. Hundreds of millions of men have known and know today that passage in the Scriptures which describes the Fall, but no one is able to understand it, still less to explain why a mystery was revealed to us which none can grasp, even after the revelation. The theologians, even those like St. Augustine, have feared this secret, and instead of reading what was written in the Bible, viz: that man became mortal because he ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, they read that man became mortal because he disobeyed God. Others have conceived it still more crudely, and seen the original sin in the concupiscentia which Adam, seduced by Eve, is alleged to have been unable to overcome in himself. But this is not a reading; it is an artificial and calculated interpretation. If man had disobeyed some other commandment of God's, the consequences would not have been so heavy and disastrous; the Bible itself relates this later.

The point was simply that the fruit of the tree of knowledge which grew in Eden beside the tree of life bore within itself inevitable death. It was against this that God had warned man. But the warnings had proved useless. Even as man, "aft

er he had eaten of the fruit and become aware" that he was naked and must be ashamed of his nakedness, could not help but be ashamed, so "after he became aware that death existed, he could no more deliver himself from death. It was not God who "condemned" him to it - God only put into words what had happened without him; man passed his own death-sentence. He believed the Serpent's words that knowledge would increase his strength, and became a knowing, but a limited and mortal being. And the more he "knows", the more limited he is. The essence of knowing lies in limitation; this is the sense of the Biblical legend. Knowing is the power and the eternal preparedness to look about one, which again is the outcome of fear that unless one looks what is behind, one will fall victim to a dangerous and guileful enemy. Before the Fall Adam looked on Eve and was not ashamed - in human nakedness, as in all that was in the Garden of Eden, was only beauty.

The shameful, the bad, the frightful came from knowledge and together with knowledge, with its "criteria" which arrogate the right to judge and condemn. Direct seeing cannot bring with it anything bad or false. After creating lies and evil, knowledge tries to teach man how he can save himself from lies and evil through his own strength, his own works. But "knowledge" and "works" - if one accepts the mysterious Biblical legend - were precisely the source of all evil upon earth. - One must redeem oneself in other wise, through "faith" as St. Paul teaches, through faith alone, i.e. through a spiritual exertion of quite peculiar nature, which we describe as "audacity". Only when we have forgotten the "laws" which bind us so fast to the limited existence, can we raise ourselves up above human truths and human good. To raise himself man must lose the ground under his feet.

It is true, "dialectic" cannot help here, neither the yearning for "eternity" which we are alleged to feel through conscious reason in mutable time. We need not fear mutability: our arch-enemies are the "self-evident truths". I know it is immeasurably hard for man to be condemned to go without knowing whither. Obviously this ought not to be asked of him. But it is not a case of "asking". No one asks that all men should invariably disregard evidence. Perhaps, on the contrary, every one must invariably reckon with it. But many a man can also often not reckon with it, and often does not reckon with it. And then it begins to appear as though eternity were only motionless pictures of time, as though that which had a beginning had no end, as though the Biblical philosophy were far deeper and wiser than modern philosophy, and even - to be quite frank - as though the Jews had not invented the legend of the Fall, but had received it in one of those ways about which the latest theories of knowledge can tell us nothing.

50 - THE STING OF DEATH

Plato says in the Timaeus that natural death is painless and rather pleasurable than grievous. Very many philosophers are of like opinion. This is comprehensible. A philosopher is "obliged" to answer questions, i.e. to explain the problematical, to reduce the unknown to the known. Yet to him who himself wishes to learn, not to instruct others, death has always appeared something supremely unnatural, something unnatural kat' eksoch§Ün, and will always so appear to him. He sees in death the eternal problematical, a thing not compatible with the usual ordo et connexio rerum or even idearum. For him there is no need to be hypocritical, to declare that death in old age is "pleasant". Death is always frightful. It is true that nature could have arranged it differently, could have contrived that when once man feels that his bonds with the world are relaxing, he should feel great joy.

So it would have to be if death were a "natural" phenomenon. And why do we really believe that death is more natural in old age than in youth? If the word "natural" has any meaning at all, we must allow that everything in the world is alike natural: health and sickness, death in old age and death in youth. Nothing unnatural, i.e. nothing against nature, can be. If it exists, it is natural. And if this is so, then it should be much more natural, because it is more common, to d

ie in youth or middle age, through sickness or some other "chance" cause, to die in agony, than in old age and painlessly. Look at the statistics, if personal experience and observation are insufficient; only very few men reach a great age, and painless or happy death is practically unknown. Death is monstrous, agonizing and frightful. Even the outward appearance of death is ghastly. Even if the decay of the organism were not accompanied by danger to other men, yet we should have to burn or bury corpses. Those who are not used to the sight cannot see even a skeleton without a shudder which is usually called superstitious, but would be described quite differently if we looked more closely.

Thus, despite Plato, death is the most unnatural, mysterious, and enigmatic thing of all that goes on around us. And it is not by chance that it is accompanied with such horror and dread, but rather, perhaps, precisely in order to emphasize its inexplicable quality. Consequently, there is no need to palliate death, to make it less frightful and problematical. The fear of death is not fortuitous, it is integrally bound up with our innermost essence, bound with indissoluble bonds: This should be our starting-point. Plato himself knew this when he wrote the Phaedo under the fresh impression of Socrates' death. Indeed, when the Master dies under our eyes, we shall hardly entertain considerations of the naturalness of death, or of any naturalness. In such a case one thinks only of the unnatural, the supernatural. Can we then feel convinced that the natural is more legitimate and mightier than the supernatural? It is, indeed - at first sight - more comprehensible, more thinkable, more expected. But what is the value of first sight, thinkableness, comprehensibility? Socrates has been poisoned, he is no morel It is true, the "natural" does not disquiet us, it is easily borne and accepted, while it is immeasurably difficult to open the soul to the supernatural. And only before great terror does the soul resolve to apply to itself that compulsion without which it could never raise itself up above the commonplace; the ugliness and agony of death make us forget everything, even our "self-evident truths", and force us to seek the new reality in those fields which seemed to us before to be peopled with shadows and ghosts.

51 - THE SOURCES OF THE "SUBLIME"

Plotinus passes for the most "sublime" of philosophers. Some rank him even above Plato. And not, it seems, without reason. Plotinus never laughs, he does not even smile. He is solemnity incarnate. His whole task - in this he is continuing and complementing the work of Socrates, "the wisest among men" - consists in detaching man from the outer world. The inner joys, inner contentment, are, he teaches, quite independent of the conditions of our outward existence. The body is a prison wherein the soul resides. The visible world is the wall of this prison. So long as we let our spiritual welfare depend on our jailers, we can never be "happy". We must learn to despise all that is external, created; more, we must learn to regard it as "non-existent". Only then shall we attain that freedom lacking which life seems to Plotinus miserable, empty, illusory. today ordinary men treasure success, fame, health, beauty, etc. If all this is given them, they are glad; if not, sorry. Every joy and every sorrow has for ordinary, unphilosophical men its own cause.

The philosopher's joy and sorrow, however, according to Plotinus, must be groundless, autonomous. The soul is not glad because something has been "given", "presented" to it. It is glad because it wishes to be glad. It makes itself gifts and is glad in its gifts. And this possibility is reached in the state of ekstasis, of ecstasy, of departure from the world, of complete detachment from it. What cares the ecstatic for personal events, even for events which shake the whole world? Has he lost his good name, health, friends, relatives? This troubles only those who think that life is better than death. Even the destruction of his fatherland will make no impression on him who has learned the joy of fusion with God. As virtue knows no lord over itself - aret§Ü adespotos - so there is also no lord over the wise man who has grasped ultimate truth. Whatever may betide in the world

, the wise man will ever preserve his loftiness and spiritual calm.

Now the question arises: Wherein lies the essence of man's oneness with God? Who needs this - God, or the lonely human soul? But God is passionless, He needs nothing. That is Plotinus's axiom. Consequently it is the soul that needs it. The soul which, again according to Plotinus's teaching, once in wanton audacity resolved to escape from the womb of eternal being into independent existence. But is it worth while pondering over so wanton a soul and creating a philosophy for it? And then - joy of oneness! It is again only the same wanton, individual soul that can rejoice; God remains passionless, as He was ever. Is not the way pointed out by Plotinus a new audacity - this time not open, but masked - of the individual entity? In the material world it has had no luck, its first audacity has been a failure, and so it seeks to cheat God in a new way, merely to preserve its right to personal being and personal joys?

Or is Plotinus wanting to be particularly "sly", an unconscious tool in the hand of "Almighty God", a "cheated cheat"? He has been sent "from on high" to lure the audacious apostates, to lead them back to eternal submission, and, all imbued with his great, prophetic mission, he tells of the supposed "sublime" joy of the last oneness; he knows that there can be no joys for him who renounces his own self - how can there be joy and delight more when one rushes into the arms of something that has not even a being, as a hypnotized bird rushes into the cobra's jaws? But he also knows that no one would follow him if he spoke the truth, and that the eternal crime, the thought of which is such torture to his philosophic conscience, would then remain unatoned. Justice must triumph, even at the price of the destruction of the entire human race. Herein and herein alone lie the "beauty" and "sense" of sublimity. It is of this that that "One" dreams which Plotinus hymns so incomparably, at this alone does it aim. The joys, the delights, the beatitude - they are only enticements, only bait by which man must be lured, since he is incapable of understanding that the purpose of the world structure does not lie in him and his destiny, but in eternal lawfulness and the sublime severity of unalterable order.

52 - REVOLT AND SUBMISSION

In his life man often changes from audacity to subservience. But in the end he usually obeys. The history of philosophy - if the historians' opinions are to be trusted - is that of human humiliation. But has the history of philosophic teaching really expressed the history of our spiritual wrestling? And is the history of civilization, as usually portrayed, really the balance-sheet of all human activity, of all our endeavours and cognition? I think we must answer, no, it is not. Such admissions occasionally escape even professional historians in their more sincere moments. Hegel's philosophy of history is a crude and noxious falsification of life. His rational reality is neither rational nor real. Audacity is no fortuitous sin of man's, but his supreme truth. And those men who have proclaimed humility have been in their innermost being the most audacious of men. Humiliation was for them only a means, only a way in their battle for their rights. And that is why Aristotle conquered. The conquered and rejected are Plato, Protagoras, the Prophet Isaiah and the Apostle Paul among the ancients, Pascal, Shakespeare, Heine and others among the moderns. But "history", our history, reckons without its host. The judgment, the dreadful Last Judgment, is not here. Here the conquerors have been the "ideas", the "consciousness as such", and those men who have esteemed the "universal" and proclaimed it God. But "there" - there those who were rejected and defeated will be heard. The one objection might be that there was no "there", only a "here". And God is only here, not there. That is an objection, I do not contest it. Hoc signo vinces, hoc signo vincunt et vincent et vincant.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio Index ToC

In Job's Balances

<< | >>

Part III

ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Here on earth everything has a beginning, and nothing an end.

- DOSTOEVSKY

CHILDREN AND STEPCHILDREN OF TIMESpinoza in History

Et audivi vocem Domini dicentis: quem mittam? et quis ibit nobis? Et dixi: ecce ego, mitte me. Et dixit: et dices populo huic: Audite audientes et nolite intelligere, et videte visionem et nolite cognoscere. Excaeca cor populi hujus et aures ejus aggrava, et oculos ejus claude; ne forte videat oculis suis et corde sua intelligat.

And I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me. And he said, Go, and tell this people, Hear ye indeed, but understand not; and see ye indeed, but perceive not. Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes; lest they see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their hearts, and turn again, and be healed.

- ISAIAH vi, 8-10.

1

Few today would be prepared to repeat Hegel's dictum that the history of philosophy represents the stages of the spirit's development. The modern historians of philosophy look down on such abstract interpretations. They want to be historians first, and foremost, i.e. to tell truthfully "what was", and they reject in advance all kinds of preconceived ideas which hamper the freedom of inquiry. If one is to believe what men say, one must suppose that the impulse towards free inquiry was never so strong in them as it is today. The first commandment of modern philosophy runs: Thou shalt emancipate thyself from all postulates. The postulate has been declared a deadly sin, and he who makes one is the enemy of truth.

One may ask: Have we gained anything by introducing a new commandment, a new law? In St. Paul we find the enigmatic words: "But the law came that offense might abound." And in verity, where there is law, there is offense also. Hard as it is to reconcile ourselves with this, yet we must say: were there no laws, there would be no offenses. In the present case men should say openly that their postulates are more important to them than their philosophy, or than anything else in the world, and that their whole life's work consists in proclaiming and defending their postulates.

Descartes, the "father of modern philosophy", who was the first to proclaim the commandment: "there shall be no postulates in philosophy" (which he expressed in the words "de omnibus dubitandum" - doubt all things), had of course his o

wn postulate. Some mighty, insuperable force, which he could not have called by its name and whose name he did not try to discover, but which dominated him absolutely, drove him ceaselessly to the one end: to banish mystery from our lives at all costs. The truth, he says, is contained only in that which can be recognized clearly and distinctly (clare et distincte). Whatever can only be known indistinctly, whatever is mysterious, cannot be truth. And this assertion is in his opinion no postulate. It is something which no one has ever doubted or ever could doubt; neither men nor angels nor even God Himself. To exclude in advance any possibility of reproach and reply, he began himself with the assurance that he doubted everything. And only when he had convinced himself that there is a truth which withstands the assaults of any doubt, did he begin to philosophize, firmly convinced that philosophy could now no longer stray from its path, since now at last it had found the reliable compass - no mere talisman - of which men had dreamed almost since the creation of the world. God Himself, Descartes taught, wishes, must wish, us to be in possession of the truth. And this was for him as clear and distinct, i.e. as indubitable, as his first discovery: cogito, ergo sum - I think, therefore I am. God did not desire to cheat man. Velle fallere vel malitiam vel imbecillitatem testatur, nec proinde in Deum cadit: the wish to cheat testifies either to malice or to weakness, and consequently may not be ascribed to God. God did not want to be a cheat, and - the main point - He could not, even if He wished: cogito, ergo sum.

For those who have not read Descartes' works it is difficult to imagine the extraordinary vigour, the uncommon passion and emotion which fills them. In spite of the apparently abstract nature of the subject-matter, they are not treatises but poems full of inspiration. Even Lucretius's famous philosophical poem De rerum natura is not written with nearly such fire and vigour, although, as is well known, Lucretius had his own presupposition, which in many ways recalls that of Descartes, and which meant far more to him than Epicurus's atomism, to the exposition of which the poem is devoted. Descartes, I repeat, had one ambition: to free the world, life, man from mystery and from the mysterious forces which held all in their power. Dependence, on even the most perfect conceivable being, seemed to him intolerably oppressive and painful. He trusted only himself. And the thought that there was no one in the whole universe who would or could cheat him, that he need trust or believe no one, that he himself (for he trusted himself absolutely) was henceforward lord and creator of his fate, filled his soul with ecstatic delight; his treatises became poems, songs of triumph and exaltation, hymns of victory. God did not wish to cheat man, God could not cheat man even if He wished. Above God and man there was an eternal "law". Could one but see that law clearly and distinctly, all that was mysterious would become plain, mystery would vanish from the world, and men would become as gods.

Men will become as gods. This was not Descartes' language. So spoke Hegel, two centuries after him. Descartes was forced still to leave some things unspoken; he remembered, as the historians explain to us, Galileo's fate. Even his contemporaries thought so of him. Bossuet wrote of him: "Monsieur Descartes a toujours craint d'§Ütre not§Û par l'§Ûglise et on lui voit prendre des precautions qui allaient jusqu'§Ñ exc§Ús." [Mister Descartes has always feared being noticed by the Church and he took precautions that were often excessive - AK.] And yet with all his caution he fulfilled his historical mission with incomparable genius. Descartes is a milestone at the end of the thousand-year night of the Middle Ages; he is the great "leap" or turning point with which the new history, the new thought, begins. Descartes was, at that, a true "child of his age". Hegel's words can be applied to him wholly, or at least in their main part: "Every philosophy, precisely because it is the reflection of a certain stage of development, belongs to its age and is subject to its limitations. The individual is the child of his people, his world; stretch as he may, he will not reach beyond it. For he belongs to the one general spirit, which is his substance and essence; how should he transcend it ?" (Works, XIII, 59).

These are remarkable words, and merit reflection; particularly in view of the care-free self-satisfaction, or, if you will, the na§áve confidence with which they are spoken and which, incidentally, always accompanies clear and distinct judgments, "ut unusquisque, qui certitudinem intellectus gustavit, apud se sine dubio expertus est!" (as every man who has tasted intellectual certainty has undoubtedly experienced in himself) (Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-politicus, cap.I). Philosophy - so Hegel, the greatest of the rationalists, teaches us - is condemned to limitation by the spirit of its age, and there is no possibility for man to emancipate himself from this limitation. And this does not in the least embarrass Hegel; on the contrary, it charms him, for it is what resembles most closely the much - desired, long - awaited scientific truth, that which is cognized clare et distincte, so clearly and distinctly that we cannot even suspect that God Himself, did He wish it never so strongly, could mislead us now. And even after a man has read Hegel's dictum that he is a child of his age and reproduces in his judgments, not the truth, but what the general spirit wishes at any given historical moment, not only is he unable to emancipate himself from the limitation, but it is not even granted him to feel that limitation and to recognize it for something that should not be, something imposed from outside, for a repulsive, oppressive nightmare, of which, even if one cannot awake from it, one should yet know that it is no reality but an agonizing dream. Represent a fortuitous, limited truth and be satisfied, aye, be glad and rejoice thereat!

Hegel writes again in the same work, indeed, in the very chapter from which the previous lines were quoted: "Philosophy is not somnambulism, but the most waking consciousness." But if what he said of the spirit of the age is true, then philosophy - what Hegel calls philosophy - is the purest somnambulism, the philosophic consciousness is the most unawaking consciousness. It is, indeed, most important to note here that the state of somnambulism, as such, cannot, generally speaking, be held to be any great misfortune; perhaps it is even a piece of "good fortune". Somnambulists often do things which seem to waking men supernatural. Perhaps somnambulistic thinking is useful, even very useful. But however useful it may be, yet in no case - even though it should turn out (and there is every indication in favour of this supposition) that the supreme scientific discoveries and inventions have been made by men in a state of somnambulism - in no case must philosophy be led into temptation by profit and advantage, however great. Thus Descartes' own rule of de omnibus dubitandum still leads us, willy-nilly, to doubt his postulate and forces us to ask ourselves: Are we then really cheated by clear and distinct judgments? Are not the clarity and distinctness of a judgment a sign of its incorrectness? In other words, is it not the case that God both desires and is able to cheat men? And that precisely when He has to cheat men, He sends them philosophers or prophets who instil into them judgments which are clear and distinct, but false?

And yet Hegel is right, far more right than he himself suspected. Descartes was a child of his age, and his age was doomed to limitation and errors, which it was its lot to expound and proclaim as truths; it is astonishing that out of all God's predicates Descartes was interested in one only, and that a negative: God cannot be a cheat. Descartes asked of God only not to disturb him in his scientific researches, i.e. not to interfere in human affairs. God could not cheat men in everything. Cogito, ergo sum. By this very act of awakening man to life, hence to thought, God was compelled to reveal to him that he, man, existed, and thus to reveal to him the first truth. But after He had revealed to him the first truth, God, through that act, revealed to him also the truth of what are the signs of truth: he enabled him to comprehend that only clear and distinct perceptions are true. A fulcrum has been found - the new Archimedes can continue their work confidently. Already they no longer pray: "Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our trespasses"; they simply propose to God politely that He should not interfere in human affairs: noli tangere circulos nostros. Thus Descartes taught, joyous and enthusiastic, obedient to the spirit of his age. Thus, too, many other eminent men of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries taught after

Descartes and before him. They were all convinced that God would not and could not cheat us, that the source of our errors was ourselves, our free will, and that clear and distinct judgments could not be false: this was required by the almighty time-spirit.

But now something more. Pascal was Descartes' younger contemporary. Like Descartes, he was one of the outstanding representatives of the scientific thought of his epoch. Descartes', teaching of the clear and distinct judgments was well known to him. He also, of course, knew that the spirit of the age was with Descartes, and he was easily able to guess, and probably did guess, what the spirit of the age required of its children. But he evaded fulfilling these requirements. To Descartes' gay "clare et distincte" he answered brusquely, gloomily, and surlily: "I want no clarity, and qu'on ne nous reproche pas le manque de clart§Û, car nous en faisons profession" (do not reproach us with lack of clarity, because we make it our profession). This means: clarity and distinctness kill truth... Thus spake Pascal, like Descartes a child of the seventeenth century, like him a Frenchman, and like him, I repeat, an outstanding scientist.

But how could it happen that two men who should have belonged to the same general spirit and consequently should both have represented the essence of their people and their age - that they spoke so differently? Or was Hegel "not quite" right? Obviously, a man cannot deny his nature, but surely man does sometimes succeed in disobeying the time-spirit and emancipating himself from the limitations of his time? And a second question: where is the last, final truth to be sought? With the gloomy and surly rebels against the time-spirit, who in defiance of possibility emancipate themselves from the might of their age, or with those who do not deny the impossibility and dash onward down the great highway of history in triumph and glee, in the firm belief that human understanding differs in no wise from the divine? For no one will doubt that the great highway of history is open only to the subservient. Pascal with his enigmatic "profession" stood apart from events, from the idea as it "developed". His scrappy and unordered Pens§Ûes have by chance been preserved to us, but it is not Pascal but Descartes who has remained till today the ruler of minds. Descartes was the true representative of the one general spirit of which Hegel told us. Consequently the truth, if by truth we are to understand that which stands the test of centuries, lay with Descartes.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Children and Stepchildren of Time

<< | >>

2

Modern philosophy, as I said before, admits no postulates. Still more deeply does it fear legends and myths. As we have seen, philosophers have never managed to do without postulates. We shall see shortly that both legends and myths are no less indispensable to them.

Every one knows that according to the teaching of the Bible, God created man after His own image, and after creating him, blessed him. This is the alpha and the omega of the Bible; herein lies its soul, or if I may so express myself, the essence of Biblical philosophy.

But many are probably unaware that the Hellenic world also had its legend and its myth of the origin of man, and that this myth lies at the base of nearly all the philosophical systems of antiquity, and has also been taken over entire, in disguised form, by modern rationalist philosophy. All that Hegel says in the work quoted above about the general spirit and the individual is simply a reproduction, adapted to our tastes, of this myth. Anaximander tells the myth as follows: By coming into the world, by voluntarily detaching themselves from the single common womb and becoming individual beings, things committed a great sin. And for this great sin they are doomed to the supreme punishment, annihilation. "All single things", and particularly living beings, and among living beings, of course, particularly man. God did not, as the Bible tells, create man of His free will, and after creating bless him; it was not with God's blessing, but against His will that man in self-willed and impious fashion detached himself and seized an existence to which he had no right. And consequently individual life is in its essence impiety, and for the same reason carries with it the doom of supreme punishment, of death. Thus taught the first Greek philosopher, Anaximander. Thus also taught the last great philosopher of antiquity, Plotinus: arch§Ü men to§í kako§í h§Ü tol kai h§Ü genesis (the beginning of evil is audacity and birth, i.e. the appearance of the individual being). The same, I repeat, is the teaching of modern philosophy. When Hegel says that the individual belongs to the general spirit, he is only repeating Anaximander's words. For the sake of completeness I will add that Anaximander's legend was not invented by himself, nor by the Greeks at all. It came to the Hellenic world from the East, the home of all legends and myths, on which the West, although it will not admit it, has always lived and still lives.

We have thus two legends. Man as individual being came into the world in accordance with God's will and with His blessing. Or, individual life appeared in the universe against God's will and is therefore in its essence impious, and death, annihilation, is the just and natural punishment for the sinful self-will.

How and by whom shall it be decided where the truth lies? Did God create man for life, or did man himself reach life in audacious wise, through guile and deceit? Or can it perhaps be that some men were created by God, while others forced their own way into life, against God's will? All these disquieting, fateful questions can in our opinion be answered only by human reason. And this answers that the last suggestion is wholly inacceptable. It is impossible that the metaphysical essence of all men should not be the same. It is also clear that man did not come into the world through God's blessing. Everyday experience shows us that all that arises is also subject to decay, that all that is born dies. And more: all that is born, i.e. has a beginning, must die, i.e. end. This is not only the teaching of experience; it is self-evident, it is that clearly and distinctly apperceived truth, that veritas aeterna, to which there can be no reply, which is as binding for God Himself as for man. Death is the natural end, the end adapted to the nature of things, to that of which birth is the beginning.

But if this is so, then there is no doubt that individual man invaded existence wrongfully, and consequently has no right to life. In that case the Bible story is clearly false. If we accept it, that means that we must renounce Descartes' "clear and distinct truth" and make Pascal's "manque de clart§Û" our profession! Furthermore, the Biblical God Himself, of whom it is told that He created man after His own image, becomes a myth and a false invention. For God after whose image man was created, the personal God, the individual God, is a "vague" and thus a false conception. The true idea is a clear and distinct one, it is that general or collective spirit of which we have heard from Hegel. So thought the old Greeks, so thought the men who in modern times reawakened sciences and arts, and so our contemporaries think also. But it was left to Spinoza to call everything by its own name. "For the reason and will which constitute God's essence must differ by the breadth of all heaven from our reason and will and have nothing in common with them except the name; as little, in fact, as the dog-star has in commo

n with the dog, the barking animal."

In such words a disciple of Descartes began to speak. It is undeniable that Spinoza was, indeed, a disciple of Descartes, as it is undeniable that he was a child of his age. The stake at which Giordano Bruno had been burned was, metaphorically speaking, still hot, and already Spinoza dares to proclaim aloud that everything the Bible says of God is pure invention of the fantasy. Hegel repeated Spinoza two centuries later (all Hegel is derived from Spinoza), but never even attempted to speak so openly and brusquely. Not from caution; he had no need to fear either Bruno's fate or Galileo's. But Hegel did not need to speak thus, he had no such inner requirement. Spinoza had said everything before him and done what was requisite. It was by no means simply because he feared the persecution of the Church, as Bossuet assumed, that Descartes did not speak with Spinoza' s tongue. Even if he had had no fears he would not have said that "God's will and reason have as little in common with man s as the dog-star has with the dog, the barking animal." A man speaks thus only when he feels that in his words lies not a testimony but a judgment. A fatal, a final judgment, a sentence of death.

I have quoted a short passage out of Spinoza's Ethics. I shall not maintain that very many similar judgments could be found in Spinoza's books or letters. On the contrary, open admissions and brusque, challenging assertions are comparatively rare with him, and when they are found it is always quite unexpectedly, as though they broke out against his will from some mysterious depths of his being, hidden even from himself. On the surface it is always the mathematical method: quiet, consistent, clear proofs. He speaks exclusively of the clare et distincte, as though clarity and distinctness alone occupied him. Had he read Pascal's remark that one could "faire une profession" of lack of clarity, he would presumably have said, in a favourite phrase of his, that Pascal was one of those men who sleep with open eyes or dream waking.

Spinoza probably did not know Pascal, but the kind of thoughts which Pascal held, which he, so to speak, gripped convulsively, were, of course, only too familiar to Spinoza, and he held his historic mission to be to combat precisely this kind of thought. For when Pascal maintained that he did not accept clarity, he was rejecting precisely that commandment which the time-spirit had brought to every child of all the leading peoples of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Already Giordano Bruno went to the stake in fulfillment of the demands of the mighty spirit, Campanella passed his whole life in prison and suffered the most cruel tortures, Galileo escaped Bruno's fate only by pretended recantation. All the leading men of this epoch were drawn, were driven by irresistible force, to a common goal. All sought with joy and great delight that which Descartes described by the words clare et distincte. Mystery and the mysterious were to be banished at all costs from life, utterly eradicated from it. Mystery was darkness, mystery was man's most dreadful enemy.

Only a few lonely men of Pascal's sort did not share the general joy and delight, as though they had guessed that clare et distincte or the lumen naturale were pregnant with great danger and that the time - spirit which had attained unrestricted possession of the best minds of the time was the spirit of lies and evil, not of truth and good. But Pascal, as I said before, stood outside history. Perhaps because he was grievously sick, or perhaps his grievous sickness was expiation (or a reward? that, too, is possible) for disobedience to the time - spirit. History is much more complex and tangled than Hegel thought, and the history of philosophy, if it did not let itself be seduced by simplified and therefore apparently convincing interpretations, could discover many things much more interesting and significant than the stages of development and self-sufficient dialectic. Perhaps it would then become clear, at least in part, whence the spirit gets that strength with which it subdues man, and wherein the function of that spirit resides. Perhaps we should understand then that the task of the philosophy of history does not at all lie in depicting the "process of development" of phil

osophic systems, that such a process can indeed be observed, but that far from initiating us into the holy of holies of philosophers, into their most secret thoughts and experiences,~ it actually robs us of the possibility of holding intercourse with the outstanding men of the past. The history of philosophy, philosophy itself, should be and often has been simply a "wandering through human souls", and the greater philosophers were ever wanderers through souls.

Our history, however, has nothing to say about Pascal in his character of philosopher. Spinoza' s own "historical" significance was determined, not by what was for him the most important and significant thing, but by what he said and did against his own will in fulfillment of the demands of the time-spirit. For it must be repeated, again and again: our history in general, and the history of philosophy in particular, is, in Hegel's words, exclusively interested in the "general", in the conviction, instilled into us by the Hellenic philosophers, that the "general" alone is real and sure, while all "individual" is through its origin criminal, impious, and illusory.

Spinoza's influence on the philosophy which succeeded him was immeasurable; and that precisely because, in contrast to Pascal, he did not evade the mission imposed upon him by the time-spirit. I think it will be no exaggeration to say that Spinoza, not Descartes, must be described as the father of modern philosophy, if by philosophy one understands attitude to life in the comprehensive sense of the words, if one seeks in it what the Greeks called pr§ætai archai hridz§æmata pant§æn (the first principles, the roots of all things), or Plotinus to timi§ætaton (what matters most). Descartes, as we remember, did not allow the thought of God to perturb him in the least. If God will not and cannot cheat men, if God is of His nature immutable and always like Himself (the two ifs are equivalent, each serves as condition for the possibility of positive, scientific knowledge) - that is all that is required. Descartes did not expect and did not wish to expect more from the "perfect being". When he proclaimed his "de omnibus dubitandum" he had no intention of really doubting everything. The only doubt was whether any one in the universe could hinder man from creating science, physics, analytic geometry, prima philosophia. He was convinced in advance that if he were left alone and not disturbed by the evil but mighty, or the good but unstable gods, he would create a perfect knowledge.

How could a lonely man, come but yesterday into the world and to-morrow doomed to die - how could he resolve to undertake so gigantic a task, apparently so far beyond his strength, and to assume personal, individual responsibility for it? And yet he did so resolve, and without the slightest fear. On the contrary, he rejoiced and was glad; God does not interfere in our affairs, God stands outside us, or better still, there is no God. It is clear that Descartes did not so much as suspect what he had undertaken when he proclaimed his de omnibus dubitandum, his clare et distincte, and his stable, immutable God who would not cheat man and could not even if He would. He did not guess that what had happened to Adam of old was being repeated with him. The part of the Serpent is played here by the invisible time-spirit (which is so invisible that Hegel himself, and all of us after him, are prepared to hold it, not for a mythological creature, but for a mere notion). Eritis sicut dei scientes bonum et malum: ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. Hegel, who was much more care-free than Descartes, used to say outright that man, having eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, had become as God. Mystery had vanished out of the world, everything had taken on sharp and clear-cut outlines, everything had become clear and distinct.

Now we understand Pascal. In his whole being he felt that clarity and distinctness, the stable God who cannot and will not cheat man, were the beginning of death and annihilation. Spinoza felt this also. But God's ways are inscrutable. Like the Prophet Isaiah, Spinoza heard the voice of God, saying, Whom shall I send? Who will go? And he answered, Here am I, send me. And when God commanded him, saying, Go hence and proclaim it to all peoples of the earth, Spinoza went fo

rth and said to them those dreadful words which I have quoted: God's will and reason have as little in common with man's as the dog-star with the dog, the barking animal. In other words, the Bible's words: "Man was created after God's image", are lies and invention. The Greeks, to whom the wisdom of the far East had reached, knew the truth. God did not create man; man himself rushed wickedly and impiously into being. A God as creator of heaven and earth, who created mankind of His free will, must not be. Such a God must be slain; and slain, through inscrutable decree, by him who loved Him above all others. We remember the story of how God tempted Abraham, commanding him to bring his first-born son Isaac as a sacrifice. But at the last moment an angel stayed the father's hand from the murder. Spinoza, on the other hand, had to carry his dreadful work to an end. No angel came flying to stay his hand, and he who loved God best became His murderer.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Children and Stepchildren of Time

<< | >>

3

Another historical remark, necessarily only a short one.

Two thousand years ago there came to the peoples of Europe the light out of the East - lux ex Oriente: the Bible. And the peoples of the West, as history tells us, received the light and saw in it the truth. But twenty years before the beginning of the Christian era there appeared in Alexandria a strange man called Philo. He was no great original thinker. He was no Plotinus, Descartes, or Spinoza. And yet fate, or in Hegel's words, the time-spirit, laid upon him a vast historical mission. He was chosen out to "reconcile" the Bible with Hellenic philosophy, the Logos with God. Philo fulfilled his mission, the Bible reconciled itself with the Logos and was thereafter accepted by the peoples of Europe.

In what did this reconciliation consist? The doctrine of the Logos, as it is generally recognized today, reached its fullest flowering in the philosophy of the Stoa, with which it is inseparably bound up. The philosophy of the Stoa, indeed, determined the destinies of European thought to a far greater degree than is generally supposed. In the age after the Stoics no philosopher could be other than a Stoic. The Stoics declared: p§Ós aphr§æn mainetai (all who do not submit themselves to reason are mad). Or, in Seneca's more popular but also plainer words: Si vis tibi omnia subjicere, te subjice rationi (if thou wouldst subject all under thyself, subject thyself to reason). Herein lies the essence of Stoicism. You must subject yourself at once, one single time, renounce yourself before the face of inexorable reason, "before the law" - and then the victory, any victory you please, is yours. I think it needs no particular perspicuity to discover here behind the Stoics' commandment Anaximander's old thought. Man has impiously, sinfully invaded free being, and the curse of sin cannot be lifted off him until he has admitted his sin and expiated his audacity (tolma) by eternal subservience to the super-personal, or rather, the impersonal principle. But what was in the beginning? Plotinus, the last great philosopher of antiquity, who epitomized everything that Hellenic thought had created before him, said: arch§Üi o§ín ho logos kai panta logos (in the beginning was reason and all is reason). And accordingly the beginning of evil is man s audacious refusal to bow down before the preworldly Logos, the preworldly Law.

Plotinus has still other motives. There was in Plotinus, as in Plato and also in Spinoza, a very strange complexio oppositorum; he combined in himself aspirations which were completely exclusive of each other. It was he who taught that we must drame§àn huper t§Ün epist§Üm§Ün (transcend understanding) and exalted in incomparablesalms the ecstatic "escape", the emancipation from that very impersonal and soulless Logos-Law. But Plotinus the psalmist had no "historic" significance. A few - if eminent - men were inspired by him: Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Augustine, the mediaeval mystics. But this side of him remained quite alien to philosophy; philosophy needs no inspired hymns, but adequate, that is, clear and distinct ideas. Philosophy wishes to be itself an historic force, to exercise influence, conquer, dominate spirits, guide humanity. But we remember Seneca's frank admission: Wouldst thou subject all things under thyself, then subject thyself to reason, that is to the Logos. Even the Bible, that is, the Biblical philosophy, which had hitherto been the jealously guarded preserve of a small people, and had stood aside from the great historical arena, saw itself obliged to subject itself to the Logos, the moment it was called to enter the arena of the world and subject humanity under itself. Victory was not possible otherwise.

Who is to be sent? Who will dare such a work? Philo undertook it. He, the first Apostle of the Gentiles, led the Bible before reason and forced it to bow down to it. The Bible contains everything that your sages teach - thus he "reconciled" the lux ex Oriente with that lumen naturale which had shone for so many centuries on the Hellenic world. This meant that the lux ex Oriente had to pale before the immortal sun of human reason. In the fourth Gospel the words were inserted, en arch§Üi §Ün ho logos (in the beginning was the Word), and the civilized nations declared themselves ready to accept the Bible, since it contained everything whereby they had been accustomed to conquer.

For fifteen hundred years the reason of European humanity endeavoured to quench the light come from the East. But the light refused to be quenched. And then was heard again the mysterious call: Whom shall I send, who will go for Me? The historians describe this under solemn names: renaissance of science and the arts. But no one, obviously not even the genius of Descartes, understood what was required. They all only went half-way. They all still reconciled the Bible with the Logos. Man hesitated, feared to lift his hand against his creator. They all preferred not to pose the fateful question. Better think, as had been usual since Philo, that reason did not contradict revelation. Or, as Descartes taught, that God cannot and will not cheat man, and that which the lumen naturale reveals to us cannot help but agree with what is revealed by the lumen supranaturale. Descartes was a thoroughly sincere man. If he did not revolt against the Bible, this was not at all, as Bossuet wrote and historians repeat after him, out of fear of the Church's persecutions. He feared indeed - and how greatly ! - but not the Church, but rather what is called in modern knowledge the verdict of conscience; what the more expressive terminology of the Middle Ages called the Last Judgment. To step out before men and proclaim that there is no God! To go and with one s own hand slay God, who had lived for so many thousands of years and from whom all men lived! De omnibus dubitandum, taught Descartes. And he could doubt much, very much, but one thing was indubitable for him: had God Himself commanded him to slay Him, he would not have dared such a crime. Man can commit a crime at God's wish, can sacrifice to God father and mother, his firstborn, aye, the whole world - but man cannot consciously slay his God, even did He himself command it with a clarity and distinctness which excluded any possibility of misinterpretation. Yet it is impossible not to fulfill God's will. Descartes became accomplice to the great crime of modernity. God can not cheat man; was that not the first blow dealt to God by one of the numerous conspirators - the involuntary somnambulists, if you will - of the Renaissance epoch? God cannot cheat, and there is much besides that God cannot do. Above God there is a whole series, a whole system of "cannots" to which men, in order to hide from themselves the sense and significance of them, have given the name veritates aeternae (eternal truths). When Descartes slew God, he thought that he was only saving science. And we remember

that he rejoiced, was glad, sang. The whole age of the Renaissance, whose last representative he was, rejoiced and was glad. The night of mediaevalism was over! The clear light, cheerful morning had dawned.

But the voice cried still: Whom shall I send? Who will go for Me? Who will deal the final blow? Where is that Brutus who will kill Caesar, his best friend and benefactor? And lo! as we said, Spinoza answered that call. He took a resolution that none before him had been able to take. Philo, we know, had "reconciled" the Bible with Hellenic wisdom, had made it appear as if by inspired interpretation of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics one could find in ancient philosophy a justification of the Bible. The Renaissance, up to and including Descartes, followed in Philo's footsteps. But of Spinoza more was required. Strangely enough, precisely that was required of him which the others had been spared, because it was harder, more impossible for him to do this than for any one else. He, who loved the Lord his God with all his heart and with all his soul - how often and how emphatically he speaks of this in his earlier works and in the Ethics - was condemned by God Himself to slay God. The time was ripe, man must slay God - but who can slay God like him who has loved Him above all else in the world? Or rather: only he can slay God who has loved Him above all treasures on earth. Only of such a one will men believe that he has in reality and not in words accomplished this crime of all crimes, this deed of all deeds.

And verily, it is enough to look at Spinoza's eyes - not those, of course, which are shown in his portrait, but those gentle and inexorable eyes - oculi mentis, the eyes of the spirit which gaze out at us from his books and letters, and it is enough to hear his slow and heavy steps, the gait of the Commendatore's effigy, and all doubts will vanish. This man has committed the supreme crime and taken upon himself the whole super-human burden of responsibility for what was committed. Compare, I repeat once more, Spinoza with his great predecessor and master, Descartes; he has no trace of those impulsive joys and that care-free gaiety which fill the lyrical treatises of the latter, his Principia, Meditationes, Discours. Compare Spinoza with his remote successor Hegel. Hegel only lives from what he has received of Spinoza. But the crime was not committed by him, but by another. Hegel is the lawful owner of the "spiritual" possessions, and makes quiet and assured use of them, without at all suspecting or even troubling to ask in what way the wealth which he inherits was acquired. But Spinoza only repeats, again and again: non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere (laugh not, weep not, be not wroth, but understand). What can tears and curses avail? It is done, the dreadful deed is done, it cannot be repaired. And lastly - can a man laugh who has slain God? One must not laugh, no one will ever laugh again in the world.

Or perhaps it is not so at all. The rest of humanity is innocent of Spinoza's crime, and not responsible for it. And Spinoza, after just saying that one must not laugh, nor weep, nor be wroth, teaches his neighbour, without even noticing that he might be caught out in a contradiction (he is beyond caring about contradictions) that he may take pleasure and laugh and enjoy all the delights in which daily life is so rich. For those men who do not even suspect what is hidden under the clear and distinct appearance, and what fearful things happen in the world - for them life, too, must be quiet and easy. They shall not, he says, poison their existence through fears and hopes - affectus metus et spei non possunt per se esse boni (the emotions of fear and hope cannot in themselves be good). Live without thought for anything, others take thought for you. The way which he has chosen for himself is a difficult, steep and painful one, fitted only for few, perhaps for one alone; omnia praeclara tam difficilia quam rara sunt (all noble things are as difficult as they are rare). Of this difficulty he tells us little, hardly anything. Only from time to time, as though against his will, admissions flicker up which, if collected and compared with what is commonly described as his teaching would make clear to us the meaning of what we, with Hegel, call the time-spirit, and at the same time of that which Hegel knew not and Spinoza

himself described in the phrase "sub specie aeternitatis". If the time-spirit speaks out of a man, if he serves history, then, in spite of Hegel, not his true essence is there expressed, but what is most external, acquired, superficial in him, most foreign and even hostile to his inmost self. Obedient to the time-spirit, Spinoza recites Descartes' thoughts and praises clarity and distinctness. But at the bottom of his soul he like Pascal, honours and reveres mystery, hates and despises all that is clearly and distinctly cognized. The obvious is necessary for every man, for the mob, of which he says himself: "Terret vulgus nisi paveat" (the mob terrifies unless it is afraid). The mob must be kept in check, intimidated by laws and punishment for disobedience to the clear and distinct requirements of the law. But Spinoza himself forgot not the words of St. Paul that the law came that sin should prevail. The prophets and apostles heed neither time nor that history in which, according to Hegel, the spirit of the age develops. The spirit of the prophets and apostles bloweth as it listeth. Their truths are, in Spinoza's words, not truths of history but truths sub specie aeternitatis.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Children and Stepchildren of Time

<< | >>

4

One of the leading modern philosophers, Henri Bergson, writes in his first book: "Le moi, infaillible dans ses constatations imm§Ûdiates, se sent libre et se declare" ("The ego, infallible in its immediate cognitions, feels itself free and declares this"). The chapters of this brilliant book which are devoted to inquiry into freedom of will are among the best products of the philosophic literature of recent years. Bergson's perspicacity is extraordinary. It is all the more strange that he was able to write this sentence. Immediate cognition presupposes not "our" ego but my ego. Our ego, i.e. the ego as such, le moi, is not a thing which is given immediately, and is correspondingly incapable of any immediate cognition. If Bergson wished to remain within the limits of immediate cognition, he could only say: my ego feels itself free and declares this. But he has no right to assert that every ego feels itself free; this is the mistake described in logic as metabasis eis allo genos (a transition into another field). There is nothing improbable in one ego feeling itself free and another unfree. And if immediate cognition is infallible, then in those cases where we are confronted with two opposite assertions, we have no alternative but to accept both, even though they appear mutually exclusive. Bergson's ego feels itself free; that requires no contradiction. But the ego of another man feels itself unfree; he too, must not be contradicted.

The problem of free will is thus complicated infinitely. But if we admit immediate cognition to be infallible, philosophy will find itself by its very nature placed in an extraordinarily difficult position; it will have to renounce general judgments - and will any one ever consent to this? How can we be sure that all egos will always feel alike and cognize alike? Bergson feels himself free, as he tells us. But Spinoza tells us something quite different. With obstinate conviction he repeats many times, he hammers into us, that he does not feel himself free; see especially Letter LXII, where he writes, inter alia: "Ego sane, ne meae conscientiae, hoc est, ne rationi et experientiae contradicam, nego, me ulla absoluta cogitandi potentia cogitare posse, quod vellem et quod non vellem scribere." ("I indeed deny, in order not to contradict my conscience, i.e. my reason

and experience, that I am enabled by any absolute power of thought to think what I meant to write and what not.") He repeats that the feeling of freedom is an illusion, that a stone, if it possessed consciousness, would be convinced that it was falling to earth freely, although it is quite evident to us that it cannot do anything else except fall. And all these assertions of Spinoza's are neither theory, nor "naturalism", nor "conclusions" from general theses, but they are a witness of experience, a voice of the deepest and most serious inner events. Other men also whom we cannot possibly call "naturalists", and whose honesty we have no right to doubt, have testified with equal force and persistence to similar experiences. Remember, for example, Luther's De servo arbitrio, written by him in answer to Erasmus of Rotterdam's Diatribae de libero arbitrio.

It is astonishing, too, that Spinoza "felt" differently during the different periods of his life. When he wrote his Cogitata Metaphysica he maintained with decision that the will was free dari voluntatem. In his Ethics and Letters he maintains the contrary with equal decision. If we regard the law of contradiction, we say that in one or the other case he was speaking untruth. But if we disregard this "law" and assume, as Bergson rightly teaches, that our ego is infallible in its immediate cognitions, then we shall come to a quite unexpected result, or rather, we shall be confronted with a great riddle. Not only is one man's will free and another's unfree, but even the will of one and the same man is free at one period of his life and unfree at another. When Spinoza wrote his Cogitata Metaphysica, his will was still free. When he wrote the Ethics it was already enslaved; some power had mastered him to which he submitted himself with the same obedience with which the stone submits to the law of gravity. It was not he speaking now, but something speaking within him, from his mouth; clearly that same "time-spirit" in which Hegel saw and hailed the motive force of history. Or, if we are not afraid of Biblical metaphors, Spinoza spoke, not what he wished, but what God commanded him to say. It is all one now whether or not he agreed with what he proclaimed to mankind: he could not help but proclaim it. Go hence and tell thy people, or even not thy people alone, but all peoples (Spinoza, like Philo, was an apostle of the Gentiles, he appealed to all mankind), and speak so that they shall see but perceive not, shall hear but understand not, that their hearts shall be fat and their eyes shut.

And thus Spinoza had to act. If, he taught, ye would attain the truth, then forget all, forget the Biblical revelation, remember only mathematics. Beauty, ugliness, good, evil, joy and sorrow, fear and hope, order and disorder, all these are human matters, all this is transitory and has no connection with truth. Ye imagine that God cares for the needs of man? That He created the world for man? That God has great purposes? But where there are purposes, care, joy, and sorrow, there is no God. To comprehend God one must strive to emancipate oneself from cares and joys, from fears and hopes, from all purposes great and small. The true name of God is necessity: "Res nullo alio modo a Deo produci potuerunt, quam productae sunt" (things could not have been created by God in any other way than they were created). As all theorems of mathematics and all its truths proceed, with the necessity which knows no law above itself, from its fundamental conceptions, so too everything in the world happens with the same ineluctable necessity, and there is no force capable of taking up the battle with that order of being which has existed since all eternity. Deus ex solis suae naturae legibus et a nemine coactus agit (God acts only in accordance with the laws of His own nature, and is compelled by none), says Spinoza, explaining at once what these words mean: ex sola divinae naturae necessitate, vel (quod idem est) ex solis ejusdem naturae legibus (only according to the necessity of His divine nature or - what is the same thing - only according to the laws of His very nature). This is the supreme truth which we can comprehend, and after comprehending which we seek to achieve the highest of existing goods, namely, spiritual satisfaction and peace, acquiescentia animi. Think not that through your virtues ye could win God's favour. Everyday experience teaches us that good and ill fortune befall in like measure the godless and the pious, the virtuous and the vicious. This is so, this wa

s so, this will be so. Consequently also, it must be so, for this proceeds from the necessity of the divine nature and there is neither need nor possibility to alter the existing order of things. (Hegel said then: What is real is rational.) Must virtue be rewarded? Virtue is its own reward. Vice seeks for reward - and receives it; since if virtue needs no reward and if there is any reward in the world, then it necessarily falls to vice, which does need it and receives it gladly.

Spinoza did not stop here. He says: Si homines liberi nascerentur, nullum boni et mali formarent conceptum quam diu liberi essent (If men were born free they could have no conception of good and evil so long as they were free). And to illustrate this truth of his he appeals to the Biblical legend of the Fall. The power to distinguish between good and evil was lacking in the first man, i.e. vice differs in no way in its nature" from virtue. And this did not prevent Spinoza from devoting the whole of his Tractatus Theologico-politicus - a treatise of immense historical importance, determining amongst other things the Protestant, and not only the Protestant, theology - to proof of the thought that the Bible does not at all try to teach men the truth, but that its task is solely a moral one: to teach man to live virtuously.

But how in this case could the legend of the Fall get into the Bible? And why does the Bible begin by revealing to men a truth utterly incomprehensible to their understanding: that their ideas of good and evil are fundamentally quite illusory: that "law", in St. Paul's words, "came after", only when history began, and "that offense should abound"; that the first man could not distinguish between good and evil, did not know the law, but when he plucked the fruit from the tree of knowledge - i.e. began to distinguish between good and evil - accepted the law, and together with the law also death? This is a very obvious contradiction, and no fortuitous one, as none of the contradictions of which Spinoza's works are full are fortuitous. The legend of Spinoza's unusual logicality should long since have been forgotten. It is due only to the outer form of his presentation, which is apparently mathematical on the surface: definitions, axioms, postulates, syllogisms, proofs, etc. Spinoza's system is composed of two quite irreconcilable ideas. On the one hand the "mathematical view of life" (this is what possessed "historical" significance and made Spinoza so "influential"); everything in the world happened with the same necessity with which mathematical truths develop. When a correspondent reproached him for esteeming his philosophy the best, he answered brusquely: "I esteem it, not the best, but the true. And if you ask me why, I will tell you: for the same reason why you think the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles."

Spinoza speaks constantly of mathematics. He declares that man would never have known truth had there been no mathematics. Mathematics alone possess the true method of inquiry, mathematics alone are the eternal and perfect prototype of thought, and precisely because they deal, not with human ends and needs, but with figures, lines, surfaces; in other words, they seek the "objective" truth which exists in itself, independent of men or other conscious beings. Man imagines that everything was created for him, that he forms within the universe a sort of State within the State. It is true that the Bible contains the words: When God created man, He said to him that the whole world was his. But these are only phrases, to be taken, not literally, but metaphorically. A reason trained by mathematics to clear and distinct judgment sees that man is only a link in the endless chain of nature, is nothing different from the other links, and that the Whole, the whole nature of God or Substance (what universal rejoicing there was when Spinoza described God by the "liberating" word substance!) is that which exists over man and for its own sake - and not even for its own sake, since any "sake" humanizes the world, but simply exists. And this Whole is God, whose reason and will have as little in common with those of man as the dog-star with the dog, the barking animal; i.e. God can possess no reason and no will at all. This is the first point which man must grasp. And after he has grasped such a God - here beg

ins again the "contradiction" of which I spoke - he must learn to love Him, as it is commanded in the Bible, with all his heart and with all his soul.

Learn to love God with all one's heart and with all one's soul! Why go with such a demand, not to a stone, a tree, a plane, or a line, but to man, who, as we have just been told, is no different from the stone, the tree, or a plane? One might equally well ask a second question: Why love God? The Bible demanded love of God. That was natural; the Biblical God possessed reason and will. But how learn to love a God that is only Cause, that does what He does with the same necessity as any inanimate thing? Spinoza, indeed, calls God free, since He works after the laws of His nature. But everything works after the laws of nature. Spinoza himself concludes the introduction to the third part of his Ethics thus: "I shall treat of the nature and force of the affections and of the power of the spirit over them, using the same methods as I employed in the previous part of my work, when I treated of God and the soul, and shall treat of human actions and appetites as though dealing with lines, planes, and bodies." I ask again: if we judge of God, of the soul, of human passions even as we do of lines, planes, and bodies, who then will entitle us to ask of man, or even to advise him, to love God and not a plane, a stone, or a lump of wood? And why do we address the demand to love to a man and not to a line or an ape? Nothing of what is in the world may claim a peculiar position; all "things" in the whole universe have proceeded with the same necessity out of the eternal laws of nature. Why, then, does Spinoza himself, who was so vexed when man contrasted himself with nature, as though wishing to form a State within a State, set man apart, as something toto caelo different both from a plane and from a line, both from a lump of wood and from an ape; make demands of him, begin to evaluate, speak of ideals, etc.? Why did he introduce a "State within a State", why in his main work - not in vain called Ethics - did he not submit himself without a murmur to mathematics, and speak of man, despite his solemn vow, as mathematician never yet spoke of triangles and perpendiculars? Is this that Spinoza whom God commanded to go among men and blind them? How then, has he not fulfilled God's will? Has he resisted that which none could resist?

No, certainly not. God's will had been fulfilled. If Spinoza had once answered the "Whom shall I send?" with "Here am I, send me," he could then no longer evade his "historic" mission, even as Descartes and other great sons of the early and late Renaissance could not evade it. Spinoza had slain God, i.e. he had taught men to think that God is not, that there is only a substance, that the mathematical method (i.e. the method of indifferent, objective, or scientific inquiry) is the only true path of inquiry, that man does not form a State within a State, that the Bible, the Prophets, and the Apostles did not discover the truth, but only brought men moral instruction, and that moral instructions and laws can replace God entirely, notwithstanding that man, if he were born free and if he had not plucked the fruit of the tree of knowledge, could not distinguish good and evil, and that there would have been no good and evil at all, but everything would have been "very good", i.e. everything would have been as God proposed it when He created the world - not after the laws of His own nature, but after His own will - looked upon it, and found it good. But this divine "outlook" which the first man had before the Fall is no more given to man. "Blind their hearts, that they behold and see not." Or that they see clearly and distinctly, clare et distincte, but not that which is, and be convinced that that which they see clearly and distinctly is that which God beheld on the Seventh Day, the day of rest, when He rested from His work and found the world good.

Spinoza did all this. He imbued men with the thought that one could love God with all one's heart and with all one's soul, even as the psalmists and the prophets loved Him - even if God is not, if in God's place be set objective, mathematical, reasonable necessity or the idea of human good, which differs in nothing from reasonable necessity. And men believed him. The whole of modern philosophy, which in general expresses, not what is interesting men deeply, but what the

time-spirit whispers in their ear; modern philosophy, which is so firmly convinced that its visions or, as they are now commonly called, its "intuitions" are the greatest possible fullness of vision, not only for men, but also for angels or gods (this is the usual modern mode of expression, not my own invention) - this proceeds straight from Spinoza. Any "philosophy of life" other than "ethical idealism" is almost unthinkable today. Fichte said with full conviction that the whole meaning of Christianity lay in the first verse of the Gospel according to St. John: en arch§Üi §Ün ho logos. With no less equanimity Hegel saw the supreme task of mankind in the Stoic commandment of the abandonment of personality and its melting into substance. I say "equanimity" - for here is the essential. Neither Fichte nor Hegel slew God. Another slew God. They did not even guess that they had inherited the certitudo (certitude) won at the price of the supreme crime. They imagined that this their certitudo, this their self-assured vision, was given them by nature itself. When confronted with self-evidence face to face, it never occurs to them that its source could be so strange and mysterious a one.

Our contemporary Edmund Husserl, a direct and legitimate spiritual descendant of Descartes, who continually and openly appeals to him, declares solemnly: "Self-evidence is not in fact a sort of index of consciousness attached to a judgment, calling to us, like a mystic voice from another world, 'here is the truth!', as though such a voice had something to say to us free spirits, and had not to prove its title" (Ideen, p. 300). And it could not be otherwise. God sent out his prophets to blind and bind men, that they, fettered and blinded, should hold themselves free and seeing. Why was that necessary? Did Spinoza know that? Do we know it, who read Isaiah and Spinoza? Not only can this not be answered; such a question cannot even be put... There can be no doubt that Spinoza, going the way pointed out by Descartes, overcoming the "dualism" of space and thought and creating the idea, so dear to Hegel and our contemporaries today, of a "substance", felt that he was slaying Him whom he loved above all else in the world. And that he was slaying Him at His own, divine, free command and of his own, unfree, human will. Read the lines with which the - unhappily little-read - De intellectus emendatione begins. This is not Descartes' gay de omnibus dubitandum, not Fichte's ethical idealism, not Hegel's dignified Panlogism, not Husserl's faith in reason and science. I repeat that not a trace of triumph or gaiety is to be found in anything which Spinoza wrote. Not like a priest, but like a victim he goes to the sacrificial altar.

He will slay God, he has slain God for history, but in the innermost depths of his soul he feels "vaguely" "sentimus experimurque nos aeternos esse" ("we feel and learn that we are eternal"); that without God there is no life, that true life lies not in the perspective of history, sub specie temporis, but in the perspective of eternity, sub specie aeternitatis. And this "vague", hidden, barely visible knowledge (not always, indeed, visible even to himself or to others) appears in his whole philosophy. Not in those clear and distinct judgments which history has received from him, and which he himself received from the spirit of the age, but in those strange, mysterious, elusive, hardly definable sounds which we cannot in our tongue describe even as the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and whose name is soundlessness. A great, eternal mystery lies in the dreadful words of the prophet: Et audivi vocem Domini dicentis: quem mittam? et quis ibit nobis? Et dixi: ecce ego, mitte me. Et dixit: vade et dices populo huic: audite audientes et nolite intelligere, et videte visionem et nolite cognoscere. Excaeca cor populi hujus et aures ejus aggrava, et oculos ejus claude; ne forte videat oculis suis et corde suo intelligat.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances

<< | >>

Part III

ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Here on earth everything has a beginning, and nothing an end.

- DOSTOEVSKY

GETHSEMANE NIGHTPascal's Philosophy

J§Ûsus sera en agonie jusqu'§Ñ la fin du monde: il ne faut pas dormir pendant ce temps-l§Ñ.Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world: there must be no sleep while that lasts.

- PASCAL, Le Myst§Úre de J§Ûsus.

1

Three hundred years have passed since Pascal's birth, and hardly less since his death: Pascal lived but a short while, thirty-nine years in all.

During these three hundred years mankind has made great advances. What, then, can we learn from a man of the seventeenth century? If it were possible to recall him to life, he could learn from us, not we from him. The more so because, even among his contemporaries, Pascal was a "reactionary"; he did not feel himself impelled, with all the rest, forwards towards a "better" future, but backwards towards the deeps of the past. Like Julian the Apostate, he wanted to turn back the wheel of time. He was himself in fact an apostate; he abjured and denied all that humanity had acquired by its common efforts in the two brilliant centuries to which a grateful posterity gave the name of "Renaissance". The whole world was renewing itself, and saw in this renewal the fulfillment of its historic destiny. But Pascal feared novelty above all things. All the strength of his restless, yet profound and concentrated mind, was applied to resisting the current of history, preventing himself from being carried forward by it.

Is it possible, is it reasonable to fight against history? Of what interest to us can a man be, who tries to make time run backwards?

Are not he, and all his works with him, foredoomed to ill-success, to failure, to sterility? There can be only one answer to this question. The verdict of history is merciless for the apostate. Pascal has not escaped the common fate. It is true that his works are still printed, still read; that he is even praised, celebrated; his august face is like the image of a saint, before which a lamp burns that will burn yet for many a long day. But no one listens to him. People listen to others, to those whom he hated and fought, and it is to others that they go to seek the truth for which he sacrificed his life. It is not Pascal but Descartes whom we call the father of modern philosophy; and it is not from Pascal but from Descartes that we receive the truth; for where else could truth be sought but in philosophy? This is the verdict of history; Pascal is admired, but passed by. It is a verdict from which there is no appeal.

What would Pascal reply to the arraignment of history if he could be brought back to life? An idle question; history deals with the living and not with the

dead. True: yet for this one occasion, for Pascal's sake, I will suppose that it were well to force history to concern itself with the dead. The undertaking is, indeed, neither easy nor straightforward. To justify itself, history would have to invent a new philosophy, for Hegel's philosophy will prove inapplicable, and it is Hegel's philosophy which all profess, even those who do not acknowledge him as master; and there were many who professed it long before his day. But would it be so terrible to take a little trouble? And is it so necessary to defend Hegel at all costs? Hitherto history has always been written on the assumption (unverified, it is true) that men, once dead, absolutely cease to exist, that they are consequently defenseless before the judgment of posterity, and without influence over the living. But the time may come when even the historians will feel that the dead were men like themselves; and then they will become more careful and circumspect in their judgments. It is our belief, indeed our strong conviction today, that the dead are silent and will always remain silent, whatever we say of them, however we treat them. But if one day we are robbed of this conviction, if we suddenly feel that the dead can come back to life at any moment, can rise from their graves, invade our lives, and stand before us as equals - how shall we speak then?

One must admit that this is possible; I mean, it is possible that the dead are not so helpless, so bereft of all power, so "dead" as we think. In any case philosophy, which, as we have been taught, should not admit any statement without proof, cannot guarantee to historians in saecula saeculorum the same security from the dead, in which the dead leave them today. In an anatomical theatre one can dissect corpses at leisure. But history is not an anatomical theatre, and it is conceivable that the historians may one day have to render account to the dead. If they are afraid to face their responsibilities and do not want themselves to be turned from judges into defendants, they had better abandon the Hegelian method of investigating the past and try to find some other. I do not know whether the Emperor Julian would have accepted the verdict of history; but Pascal, even during his lifetime, had prepared his answer to past and future generations. It runs:

"Vous m§Ümes §Ütes corruptibles. Il est meilleur d'ob§Ûir §Ñ Dieu qu'aux hommes. J'ai crai que je n'eusse mal §Ûcrit, me voyant condamn§Û, mais l'exemple de tant de pieux §Ûcrits me fait croire au contraire..." ("You are yourselves fallible. It is better to obey God than man. Seeing myself condemned, I have been afraid that I have written wrongly, but the example of so many pious writings has convinced me that this was not so...")

And again:

"Si mes lettres sont condamn§Ûes a Rome, ce que j'y condamne est condamn§Û dans le ciel. Ad tuum, Domine Jesu, tribunal appello." ("If my letters are condemned in Rome, that which I condemn in them is condemned in heaven. Ad tuum, Domine Jesu, tribunal appello.")

Thus did the living Pascal reply to the threats of Rome; thus, doubtless, would he reply to the verdict of history. In his Provincial Letters he declares categorically; "Je n'esp§Úre rien du monde, je n'en appr§Ûhende rien, je n'en veux rien ; je n'ai besoin, par la gr§Óce de Dieu, ni du bien, ni de l'autorit§Û de personne." ("I hope for nothing from this world, I fear nothing, I ask nothing of it; I need, by the grace of God, neither its riches nor its approval.") Can he be terrorized by our disapproval, or be driven to recantation by our threats? Will history appear to him as a just court of appeal, as the ultimate court? "Ad tuum, Domine Jesu, tribunal appello."

In these words, I think, lies the solution of the enigma that Pascal's philosophy presents. The supreme judge of all differences is not man, but He who is above all men. And, consequently, to find truth one must free oneself from all t

hat man generally looks upon as true. For a long time the legend prevailed that Pascal was a Cartesian; but we now know that this was not the case. Not only was Pascal never a disciple of Descartes, but Descartes incorporated everything against which Pascal fought. He says as much openly in his Pens§Ûes: "§«crire contre ceux qui approfondissent trop les sciences, Descartes." ("To write against all those who go too deeply into the sciences, like Descartes.") And finally, quite decisively, and giving his reasons for his opinion:

"Je ne puis pardonner a Descartes; Il aurait bien voulu, dans toute sa philosophie, pouvoir se passer de Dieu; mais il n'a pas su s'emp§Ücher de lui faire donner une chiquenaude pour mettre le monde en mouvement; apr§Ús cela il n'a plus que faire de Dieu." ("I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he would have liked to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this he would have no more to do with God.") "I cannot forgive" applies not only to Descartes, but to all the old philosophy in which Descartes had been reared, and all the new philosophy, of which Descartes laid the foundation. What was this philosophy except the conviction that the world can be "explained by natural means", that man can "be independent of God" (the Pelagians had formulated this thought in the phrase: Homo emancipatus a Deo); and where else but in this conviction lay the essence of Rome, since Pascal had to appeal from Rome to God?

Pascal began to feel this very early, and the last years of his life were merely one protracted and continuous struggle against the world and Rome, which were striving to emancipate themselves from God. Hence the enigmatic and paradoxical character of his philosophy and his conception of life. Those things which usually pacify men arouse in him the gravest anxiety, while conversely, the things that men most fear fill him with the greatest hopes. The older he gets, the more firmly does he entrench himself in his conception of life. Thus he becomes ever stranger and more inhuman to mankind. No one denies that Pascal is a great man, a man of inspired genius; every line of his writings bears witness to this. Yet every line taken separately, as also all his writings taken together, are useless to humanity and hostile to it. Not only do his writings give nothing; they take all. Men need something "positive"; they ask for something which will resolve their difficulties and calm their fears. What can they hope from Pascal who, in the throes of his sombre exaltation, proclaims, or rather cries aloud: "J§Ûsus sera en agonie jusgu'§Ñ la fin du monde: il ne faut pas dormir pendant ce temps-l§Ñ"? ("Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world: there must be no sleep while that lasts.")

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Gethsemane Night

<< | >>

2

Jesus' agony will last until the end of the world, and therefore there must be no more sleep during all that time. One can say this, for one can say anything, but can a man set himself such a task, and is he able to fulfill it? If he cannot, have these words any actual meaning? Like Macbeth, Pascal would fain "murder sleep"; worse still, he seems to demand that all mankind should associate itself with him in this horrid task. Human reason declares unhesitatingly that Pas

cal's demands are unreasonable and impossible of execution. And one cannot do otherwise than bow before reason. Pascal himself teaches us. "La raison nous commande bien plus imp§Ûrieusement que le ma§àtre; car, en d§Ûsob§Ûissant §Ñ l'un, on est malheureuen d§Ûsob§Ûissant §Ñ l'autre, on est un sot." ("Reason commands us far more imperiously than a master; for, in disobeying the one we are wretched, and in disobeying the other we are fools.") How, then, can we refuse to obey reason? And who will dare do so? Peter the apostle, when Jesus asked him to stay with him to assuage his sufferings, had not the strength to conquer sleep. Peter slept while Jesus prayed: "Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me!" while he cried: "Tristis est anima mea usque ad mortem." [My soul is sad unto death - AK.] When Jesus was seized by the soldiers and dragged before his merciless judges Peter went on sleeping; for it was only in sleep that a man could have denied his God thrice in one night. And yet He who knew that Peter must sleep, and in his sleep deny his God, still named him His vicar on earth, and gave him the earthly keys of heaven. Thus, according to the inscrutable will of the Creator, his vicar on earth can be none other than he who is able to sleep as soundly as Peter, who has relied so entirely on his reason, that he does not awake even when, in an evil dream, he denies his God.

It seems that this was really so, and such was Pascal's thought both when he wrote his Provincial Letters, and when he was making the notes for the "Apology for Christianity" which have come down to us as Pens§Ûes (Thoughts). This, we think, is why Arnaud, Nicole, and the other recluses of Port Royal who published his book after his death felt obliged to abridge, change, and omit so much; this thought - monstrous according to human conceptions - would have been all too evident in the notes which he left, that the Last Judgment which awaits us will be in heaven and not on earth, and that therefore man may not sleep, no man may ever sleep. Neither Arnaud, nor Nicole, nor Jansen himself, if he had been alive at this time, could have endured this thought. For Pascal himself it was clearly an intolerable burden. He alternately rejected and accepted it, without ever being able to abandon it entirely. If we turn to St. Augustine, we shall convince ourselves that he too, in spite of his veneration for St. Paul, dared not believe in God directly. For he says, and constantly repeats: "Ego vero evangelio non crederem, nisi me catholicae (ecclesiae) commoveret auctoritas." [In fact, I would not have believed the Good News, had it not been for the authority of the Catholic Church which moved me to faith - AK.]

Man cannot and dares not look at the world through his own eyes; he needs "collective" eyes, the support, the authority of his neighbour. Man accepts more easily what is strange and even obnoxious to him, if all others accept it, than what is near and dear to him, if they reject it. And St. Augustine, we know, was the father of fides implicita, of the doctrine by which a man need not himself commune direct with heavenly truth, but has only to observe those principles declared by the Church to be true. If we translate the term "fides implicita" into the language of common sense, it means that man has the right, nay is compelled, to sleep while the God-head travails in agony. This is the unequivocal command of reason, which none may disobey. In other words, the curiosity of man becomes inopportune beyond certain limits. Aristotle formulated this thought in his famous dictum: To accept nothing without proof is the sign of a lack of philosophical education.

Indeed, it is only a philosophically uneducated man, or a man without his share of common sense, who will continue to seek and to question indefinitely. It is obvious that if one once begins to ask in this way, one can never reach the final answer. But - and this is equally obvious - since we ask only in order to get an answer, we must know when it is time to stop asking. We must be ready, at a given moment, to consent to this renunciation and submit our individual liberty (a dangerous and absolutely unnecessary thing) to some person, institution, or stable principle. In this respect, as in many others, St. Augustine remained faithful to the tradition of Greek philosophy. He simply replaced the general pri

nciple or principles, the sum of which, to the ancient world, constituted reason, by the idea of the Church, which from his point of view was as infallible as reason was to the ancients. But the theoretical and practical significance of the idea of the Church and of that of reason were essentially the same. Reason guaranteed the ancients the same security and sufficiency, the same right to sleep, which the Middle Ages found in the Catholic Church. This "historic" importance of St. Augustine is determined, to a great extent, by the desire and power which he possessed of establishing below those courts which are, or which appear to be, so strong that the gates of hell shall not prevail against them. (People seldom think of heaven; so that many, even among the believers, find earth a more congenial place than might have been supposed.) St. Augustine would never have cried with Pascal: Ad tuum, Domine, tribunal appello, and Port Royal, as we have seen, omitted this phrase. Port Royal would only have dared, at the utmost, to appeal against the judgment of Rome, to the next Ecumenical Council. To appeal to God would surely have been to attack the "unity" of the Church. That is precisely what Luther did. When he, like Pascal, suddenly saw with his own eyes that the earthly keys of the heavenly kingdom were in the hands of him who had thrice denied his God, and when, horrified at his discovery, he turned his eyes from earth and sought for truth in heaven, it ended with his breaking completely with the Church.

Luther, like Jansen and Pascal, regularly appealed to St. Augustine. Neither Luther, nor Jansen, nor Pascal, was quite entitled to do this. St. Augustine disputed with Pelagius, and obtained his condemnation. But when it appeared that the Church, like every other human institution, could not exist without that Greek morality which Pelagius preached, then St. Augustine undertook to defend those very theses which he had just so brilliantly defeated. Pascal, in appealing to the tribunal of God, thus went much further than seemed necessary to his friends at Port Royal; the true Pascal, as we now see him, was for these Jansenists perhaps more dangerous than the Jesuits, or Pelagius himself. For a man who asks nothing of the world, who wants nothing, fears nothing, whom no authority can intimidate, whose thought respects no consideration and conforms to no standard - where may the thought of such a man end? today we have grown used to Pascal, we all read him from childhood, we learn extracts from his Pens§Ûes by heart. Who does not know his "thinking reed"? who has not heard: "At the last a little earth is thrown on our heads, and that is all for ever"? and who has not enjoyed his witty paradox about the history of the world and Cleopatra's nose, and so forth? We listen to these as though they were just harmless remarks, acute and entertaining; and after hearing them we could go on living and sleeping as quietly as after any other pleasant words. We forgive the "sublime misanthrope" anything, and it is probably this heedlessness of ours which has enabled "intelligent" history to preserve the works of Pascal for us, although they are far from harmonizing with the "lofty" ends which it has set itself. History "knows" that men will not see what they are not called upon to see, even if it is shown them.

Pascal himself says so, with the frankness natural to a man who fears nothing, and expects nothing of the world: "Le monde juge bien des choses, car il est dans l'ignorance naturelle, qui est la vraie sagesse de l'homme." ("The world is a good judge of things, for it is in natural ignorance, which is man's true wisdom.") And, it seems, we have no way of fighting against this natural ignorance which is the true earthly wisdom. "Ce n'est point ici pays de la v§Ûrit§Û: elle erre inconnue parmi les hommes." ("This is not the land of truth, which wanders unrecognized among men.") Let truth show itself today, undisguised, to mankind, it would not be recognized; for, according to those criteria of truth, to the sum, that is, of all the signs which we believe to distinguish truth from falsehood, we shall be obliged to acclaim it as falsehood. Above all, we shall be convinced that it is not only useless, but positively harmful to mankind.

It is the same with nearly all the truths discovered by Pascal after he had appealed from the tribunal of this world and of Rome to that of God, and learne

d there that man must not sleep until the end of the world. All these truths are harmful, dangerous, exceptionally terrifying and destructive. It is for this reason, I repeat, that they were so severely censured at Port Royal. Port Royal, and even the indomitable Arnaud, were convinced that truths should be useful and not harmful. I will admit that Pascal himself was convinced of the same. But Pascal set no great store by his convictions, as he set very little store by almost anything (this "almost", alas, spares no one, not even Pascal), that is dear to man. And this capacity to sacrifice his own human convictions like those of others, is perhaps one of the most inexplicable features of his philosophy; of which incidentally, we should probably have remained in ignorance if, instead of the disordered notes which compose his Pens§Ûes, we possessed his completed book as planned, the "Apology for Christianity". For the Apology was to defend God before man, and had, consequently, to recognize human reason as the last instance. If, then, he had completed his work, Pascal would only have been able to say what is acceptable to man and his reason. Even in the fragmentary Pens§Ûes, Pascal mentions from time to time the sovereign rights of reason, and hastens to express his loyalty to it; he is afraid of appearing a fool in the eyes of his neighbours and himself. But this submission is only formal. In the depths of his soul, Pascal despises and hates this autocrat, and is only thinking of how he can shake off the yoke of the detested tyrant, to whom all his contemporaries, even the great Descartes, so willingly bowed the knee. "Que j'aime §Ñ voir cette superbe raison humili§Ûe et suppliante !" ("How I love to see this proud reason humiliated and begging for mercy!") Pascal thought only of how to humiliate our proud and self-confident reason; how to deprive it of the power to judge God and man. Every one thought, in the words of the Pelagians, that it had been given to reason to dictate laws, quibus nos (and not only we, but God Himself) laudabiles vel vituperabiles sumus. [by which we are either praised or castigated - AK.] Pascal scorns its praise and remains indifferent to its blame. "La raison a beau crier, elle ne peut mettre prix aux choses." ("Reason can blather all it wants, it cannot fix the value of things.")

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Gethsemane Night

<< | >>

3

We have seen that Pascal calls not only Rome but reason itself before the tribunal of God. Expressly before the tribunal of God, and not that of reason, as some other philosophers known to him - they were not, indeed, many - had done before him, and do to this day. Pascal was no scholar, and his knowledge of historical philosophy was derived almost entirely from Montaigne. But, though he admired Montaigne, and paid him all honour, yet he knew very well that it was useless to appeal to reason against reason; for once make reason the supreme arbitrator, and it will not willingly decide against itself, but will always pronounce itself in the right.

But how are we to understand God's verdict on reason? Of what does this verdict consist, and what does it give us? Reason gives us assurance, certainty, strength; judgments which are clear and distinct, solid and definite. Can we hope, if we deny and depose reason, to achieve greater stability and certainty? Undoubtedly, if this were the case, we should all willingly follow Pascal. He would be accessible to us, approachable, comprehensible. But the Last Judgment in no Wi

se resembles the judgments to which we are accustomed on earth; and the decrees of the supreme tribunal in no wise resemble the decrees of earthly tribunals, just as heavenly truth in no wise resembles earthly truth. The wisest philosopher and the most unlettered artisan are equally well acquainted with earthly truth, it is always of one and the same identity, for this law is the prime, invariable certainty on which not only our thought, but our very existence is based. The essence of truth is its stability and immutability. "On aime la s§Ûcurit§Û, on aime que le pape soit infaillible en la foi, et que les docteurs graves le soient dans les moeurs, afin d'avoir son assurance." ("Men like certainty. They like the Pope to be infallible in faith, and grave doctors to be infallible in morals, in order to have certainty.") Nothing is more esteemed on earth than this certainty, this security. And this esteem was taught to man by reason; it is reason which furnishes him with those assurances and certitudes which enable him to live quietly and sleep in peace. Let us not forget that the earthly keys of the kingdom of heaven were given to St. Peter and his successors just because St. Peter was able to sleep, and had slept, while God, incarnate among men, was preparing to die upon the cross.

But Christ's agony is not yet finished. It is going on, it will last until the end of the world. "One must not sleep", Pascal tells us. No one must sleep. No one must seek security and certainty. "S'il ne fallait rien faire que pour le certain, on ne devrait rien faire pour la religion; car elle n'est pas certaine." ("If one were to do nothing except for certainty, then one would have to do nothing for religion, for it is not certain.") Such words can come only from one who has made it his task, not to draw his fellows towards religion, but to turn them from it. One might think that there had been some mistake here, some misunderstanding, that Pascal said something different from what he meant. But no; there is no mistake, for in another place Pascal says the same thing even more strongly and decisively. "Nous br§ílons de d§Ûsir de trouver une assiette ferme et une derni§Úre base constante, pour y §Ûdifier une tour qui s'§Ûl§Úve a l'infini. Mais tout notre fondement craque et la terre s'ouvre jusqu'aux ab§àmes. Ne cherchons donc point d'assurance et de fermet§Û." ("We burn with longing to find some firm stance, some ultimate, unshakable basis, on which we may build the tower that can reach up to infinity. But all our foundations crack and earth opens to the abyss. THEREFORE LET US NOT SEEK CERTAINTY OR SECURITY.")

This is what a man feels, sees, and hears who has decided, or rather who has been condemned, not to sleep until the sufferings of Christ are ended, which will not be until the end of the world. Such are the commandments, such the truths revealed to him. But can one call this truth? For the fundamental attributes of truth are its "certainty" and "security". A truth which is not certain or secure is a contradictio in adjecto, for these are precisely the tokens by which one recognizes a lie. A lie is never constant to itself; it is now one thing, now another. Then has Pascal come to worship and to reject truth?

It had to be so, since the defeat of reason gave him so great occasion for triumph. We have heard him say: "How I love to see this proud reason humiliated and begging for mercy!" And he it was who had the audacity to recommend to men, as a means of attaining the truth, to deny reason utterly. These are the words which caused such a stir and aroused indignation: "Cela vous fera croire et vous ab§Ütira." ("That will make you believe and will stupefy you.") Many efforts have been made to mitigate the import of these words, but none have been successful, and none is really necessary. We have abandoned once and for all the idea of appraising Pascal "historically". We do not judge him. We do not think that we "know" more or are wiser than he, and that therefore we have the right to accept only that part of his writing which tallies best with the level of knowledge of our own day. This pride, this superiority, could only be justified as long as we held Hegel's point of view, and sought in history the traces of a "development". Then the men of the past would be arraigned before us; and we, the men of the present, would be their judges, dispassionately executing the commands of eternal and

invariable reason, which renders account to none. But Pascal refuses to recognize reason as lawgiver over him. He does not admit our right to judge, he summons us to appear with him before the tribunal of the Almighty. And our self-assurance, the self-assurance of men who have come into the world after him, disturbs him not at all, any more than the fact that we are living, and that he is dead.

His voice, severe and imperious, comes to us from beyond the grave, where his soul, unappeased on earth, has found shelter. Our most incontestable, our firmest and most obvious truths, those "veritates aeternae" as Descartes loved to call them before Pascal's day; those "reasonable truths" as Leibniz called them later, and after him other lawful guardians of the inherited ideas of the Renaissance, even to our own day - these never weighed with Pascal in his lifetime. We may be sure that they weigh with him less than ever today; for Pascal, beyond the grave, is assuredly much more free and more daring than when, alive and among the living, he summoned Rome, reason, man, and the universe before the tribunal of Almighty God.

Rome and reason ordain it: therefore it must not be done; such is Pascal's "logic". Such, too, was Tertullian's position in an earlier age. As though he had foreseen Pascal, he wrote: "Crucifixus est Dei filius; non pudet, quia pudendum est. Et mortuus est Dei filius; prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. Et sepultus resurrexit; certum est, quia impossibile est." [Son of God was crucified; there is no shame in it because it is shameful. And Son of God died; this is so because it is absurd. And he resuscitated; this is certain because it is impossible - AK.] That is: "One need not be ashamed when reason says a thing is shameful; where reason declares it absurd, then truth will appear, and where reason proves it completely impossible, there and there alone, is complete certainty found." Thus spoke Tertullian in his life-time nearly two thousand years ago. Do you think that Tertullian, dead, has abjured his words, and that he believes now that when reason decides "this is shameful", we must be ashamed; that when reason decides "this is absurd", we must discard it; when, finally, reason has decided "this thing is impossible", we have to fold our arms. Do you think that Descartes, Leibniz, and their master Aristotle still uphold their "eternal truths" to this day, and that their logic proves itself as incontrovertible before God as it was before man?

It will be said that all this is fantastic in the extreme; men who are long dead cannot be confronted with one another; neither Pascal and Tertullian nor Descartes and Leibniz are defending any cause now; if they had one to defend, it would have to be down here, and history, which after all is native to this earth, absolutely refuses to be dragged up to heaven.

All this may be true; it passes, that is, for true today, among men. But, I must remind you again, we decided with Pascal to carry our differences before another court. We are no longer judged by reason with its "permitted", "forbidden", "shameful", and all its other laws and principles. We have put ourselves in the dock, and the laws and principles with us. We have admitted the dead to equal right with the living; judgment no longer belongs to man. It may be that we shall not hear the verdict: Pascal has told us that there will be neither certainty nor security; perhaps there will be no justice either. All these earthly treasures must go. That which will be revealed to you there will "make you believe and will stupefy you." ("Cela vous fera croire et vous ab§Ütira.")

Will you still follow Pascal, or is your patience exhausted and do you prefer to pass on to other masters who will be more comprehensible and less exacting? Expect no mercy or indulgence from Pascal. He is infinitely cruel to himself, and infinitely cruel to others. If you want to go searching in his company, he will take you with him, but he tells you beforehand that your search will bring you no joy. "Je n'approuve que ceux qui cherchent en g§Ûmissant." ("I approve those only who seek with lamentation.") His truths, or what he calls his truths, are ha

rd, painful, remorseless. He brings with him no relief, no consolation. He kills every kind of consolation. Directly man pauses to rest and collect himself, Pascal is there with his disquiet: you must not pause, you must not rest, you must march on, march without ceasing; you are tired, you are worn out; that is just as it should be; you must be tired; you must be utterly exhausted. "Il est bon d'§Ütre lass§Û et fatigu§Û par l'inutile recherche du vrai bien, afin de tendre les bras au lib§Ûrateur." ("It is good to be tired and exhausted by the fruitless search for true good, that you may stretch out your arms to the liberator.") God Himself exacts it, according to Pascal. "La plus cruelle guerre que Dieu puisse faire aux hommes en cette vie est de les laisser sans cette guerre qu'il est venu apporter." ("The most cruel war that God can wage with man on this earth, is to leave him without that war which He came to bring.") "'Je suis venu apporter la guerre,' dit-il, 'et pour instruire de cette guerre; je suis venu apporter le fer et le feu.' Avant lui le monde vivait dans cette fausse paix." ("'I came to bring war', He said, 'and to teach that war; I came to bring fire and sword.' Before Him the world was living in a false peace.")

This is Pascal's teaching, or rather this is how he translates what he heard at the tribunal of God. He discards all that is dear to man. Men love security - he accepts instability; men love solid earth - he chooses the abyss; men appreciate inward peace before all things - and he exalts wars and struggles; men long for rest - he promises weariness, weariness without end; men pursue clear, distinct truths - and he shuffles all the cards, confuses everything, and changes earthly life into horrible chaos. What does he want? He has already told us. No one must sleep.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Gethsemane Night

<< | >>

4

Pascal heard these things, I repeat, at the tribunal of the Almighty. He heard them, and accepted them without dispute, though doubtless he no more "understood" them than those do who criticize him and take exception to the reactionary character of his thought. He appeared, and still appears, to others as a madman, a fanatic. He appeared so to himself. And he was indeed a madman, a fanatic. So if we had retained the right to judge him, it would have been a small matter to convict him.

But (whether for good or evil) we have just recollected that "Non pudet, quia pudendum est"; meaning that sometimes, at least, we must not be ashamed though the whole world cry with one voice, "It is shameful". And we know too that Pascal had brought his cause before the tribunal of that God who accepted of His free will the most shameful of all things which men hold shameful. Whether we like it or not, we are obliged when listening to Pascal to revise all our "pudet, ineptum, impossibile", and all our "veritates aeternae".

We must not forget that Pascal did not exactly chose his own fate. Fate chose him. When he praised the cruelty and inexorability of Fate, Pascal was exalting God Himself, the God who had proved him with unheard-of trials, like Job of old. When he sang the praises of "absurdity" he was praising God, who had deprived him of the consolations of reason. And even when he put all his faith in the "

impossible", it was God alone who could have inspired him to such folly. Let us remember what his life was. His biographers tell us that "although nearly fifteen years passed between 1647 and his death, yet one may well say that he hardly lived at all during that time, for his maladies and incessant disabilities left him with a bare two or three years interval, not of perfect health, for that he never enjoyed, but of a more bearable invalidity in which he was not wholly incapacitated for work". His sister writes: "Il nous disait quelquefois que depuis l'§Óge de dix-huit ans il n'avait pas pass§Û un jour sans douleur." ("He told us sometimes that, from the age of eighteen, he had never passed a day without pain.") Port Royal says the same: "His sicknesses hardly left him without pain throughout his whole life."

What was this continual torture, and who ordained it? And why? We should rather like to think that this question should not be put. No one ordained Pascal's torments with premeditation, and they could serve no purpose. In our view there is not and cannot be any question of this. But for Pascal, as for mythical Job, and for Nietzsche, who was alive only lately in our midst, it is there, and nowhere else, that all the questions lie which are of significance to man. If we will not believe "reactionary" Pascal, or "primitive" Job, let us take the testimony of "advanced" Nietzsche. He tells us:

"As for my long illness, I undoubtedly owe far more to it than I do to my health. I owe it all my philosophy... Only great pain ultimately sets the spirit free. It teaches boundless suspicion. It makes of every U and X a true and genuine Y, the penultimate letter of the alphabet. Only great pain, that long and slow pain, that seems lengthily to consume us over a slow fire - only such pain as this will force us philosophers to descend to the lowest depths and to reject all that is trustful, kindly, conventional, soothing, in which we ourselves had perhaps formerly set our humanity."

Pascal could have repeated this saying of Nietzsche's word for word, and with equal right. Indeed, he says the same thing himself in his wonderful "Prayer to ask of God mercy in illness". Pascal the "believer" and Nietzsche the "unbeliever" are completely in accord in their testimony; Pascal whose thoughts all turned back to the Middle Ages, and Nietzsche who lived only in the future. And it is not only in their testimony that they are alike; their philosophies too are almost identical in the fundamental points for the reader who is able to get behind the words and to recognize the self-same essence under varying disguises. One need only call to mind what men most willingly forget, what the monk Luther expressed of old so forcefully in his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, written shortly before his break with the Church:

"Blasphemiae... aliquanto gratiores sonant in aure Dei quam ipsum Alleluya vel quaecumque laudis jubilatio. Quanto enim horribilior et foedior est blasphemia, tanto est Deo gratior." ("Blasphemies sometimes sound more pleasing in God's ear than an Alleluia itself or a song of praise. The more frightful and horrible the blasphemy, the more pleasing it is to God.")

If we compare Nietzsche's "horribiles blasphemiae" with Pascal's "laudis jubilationes", so different from one another, both equally meaningless to the modern ear, and yet, if we may believe Luther, both so precious and so familiar to God, we begin to think that "intelligent" history may be mistaken this time and that in spite of its verdict, Pascal, whom it had slain, came to life again two hundred years later in the person of Nietzsche. Or has history perhaps attained its end after all? Is he admired of all and read by none? It is possible, it seems even probable. Nietzsche, too, appealed from reason to the fortuitous, the capricious, the uncertain, from Kant's "synthetic a priori judgments" to the "will to power"; he too taught "non pudet quia pudendum est", which be translated as "beyond good and evil". He, too, delighted in absurdity" and found certainty where other men saw "impossibility".

The Abb§Û Boileau tells us of Pascal: "This great intellect always thought that he saw an abyss on his left side, and used to have a chair put there to reassure himself. I have this story at first hand. His friends, his confessor, his director, told him in vain that there was nothing to fear, that it was only the terror of an imagination exhausted by abstract and metaphysical studies; he agreed with them in all their arguments, yet a quarter of an hour afterwards he again laid open the abyss which terrified him."

It is not possible to verify this story, but to judge from Pascal's own writings, Boileau was probably speaking the truth. All that Pascal wrote proves to us that instead of the solid earth beneath his feet he always felt and saw the abyss (another strange similarity between Pascal's fate and Nietzsche's). There is, perhaps, a single error in the story: the abyss was clearly not on Pascal's left side but under his feet. The rest is either told or guessed correctly. It seems true that Pascal tried to hide the abyss from himself by a chair. "Nous courons sans souci" - it is not the Abb§Û but Pascal himself speaking now - "dans le pr§Ûcipice apr§Ús que nous avons mis quelque chose devant nous pour nous emp§Ücher de le voir." ("We run heedlessly into the abyss, after having put something before us to prevent us seeing it.") If the Abb§Û's story is an invention, it is the invention of a seer, of one who could see into the shadows where for others all things melt in a confused twilight.

It is certain that Pascal never passed a day without suffering, and hardly knew what sleep was (Nietzsche's case was the same); it is also certain that Pascal, instead of feeling the solid earth beneath his feet as other men do, felt himself hanging unsupported over a precipice, and that had he given way to the "natural" law of gravity he would have fallen into a bottomless abyss. All his Pens§Ûes tell us this, and nothing but this. Hence also his extraordinary and unexpected fears (remember his "the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me," etc.); and neither his friends nor his confessor could do anything against them.

His reality in no way resembles other people's reality. Men in general usually feel well; they seldom feel acute pain or disquiet, and do not even admit the possibility of unfounded fears; they always feel the solid earth beneath their feet, they only know by hearsay of falls into the abyss, or if they experience these things it is only a short and fugitive experience.

But does reality cease to be real when it ceases to be ordinary? And have we the right to refuse recognition to those conditions of existence which occur but rarely? Practical people naturally do not concern themselves with exceptions, to them only the rule with its steady repetition is important; but the task of philosophy is different. If somehow a man came down to earth, from the moon or some other planet, and that man were able to tell how beings unlike ourselves live in other worlds, such a man would prove a marvelous treasure-trove to us. Pascal, Nietzsche, and many others of whom I cannot speak here, are such men coming from another world of which our philosophy can only dream, a world so unlike our own that all which is the rule to us is to them the exception, and things happen continually there which happen here rarely or not at all. Here men never walk over a precipice, they have the solid earth under their feet. That is why the law of gravity is the fundamental law of our world; everything tends towards the center of the earth. It never happens among us that a man lives in perpetual torment. With us things are generally alternately difficult and easy; each effort is usually followed by rest and quiet. There nothing is easy, everything is difficult; there is no rest, no quiet, only eternal unrest; no sleep, only an endless vigil. Can we be sure of finding there those truths which we are accustomed to reverence here? Everything tells us that our usual truths are lies up there, and that what we reject is accepted there, cherished as the supreme good. Here on earth Rome is the supreme tribunal, reason the chief criterion. There the only jud

ge is he to whom Pascal cried: "Ad te, Domine, appello." "Therefore let us not seek certainty or security."

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Gethsemane Night

<< | >>

5

Pascal first came into collision with Rome when he wrote the Lettres Provinciales. It seems, at first sight, as though he were already beginning his own defence in these letters (which were also what laid the foundation of his reputation). But this was not the case. It is Port Royal, Jansen, Arnaud, Nicole, and the common cause that he is defending here. It is for this reason that their historic significance is so great: even to this day many critics regard them as Pascal's most important work. He enters on his fight with the Jesuits armed with the whole panoply of intellectual and moral arguments; that is to say, he assumes that reason and morality are a universal human tribunal, competent both for himself and Rome. In one of his last letters he does indeed let slip the admission that he wants nothing and fears no one, but it is not with these weapons that he fights. Neither Port Royal nor any one else, no matter how penetrating their understanding, would have been able to distinguish here the terrible words "Ad te, Domine Jesu, appello" which inspired the Pens§Ûes. On the contrary, Pascal, like Arnaud, Nicole, and others, has only one thought in these letters: to say no more than what semper ubique et ab omnibus creditum est. His strength is that he feels (rightly or wrongly) that he has behind him, not the problematical support of God, who is far away and whom no one has ever seen, but the real cooperation of all reasonable and right-thinking men. Every one understands that a "sufficient grace which does not suffice" is palpable and ridiculous nonsense.

Later, when he came to write the Pens§Ûes, he acquired the conviction that one must not count on the support of "every one" and that the "semper ubique et ab omnibus" is worth no more than the "sufficient grace which does not suffice". He says:

"Nous sommes si pr§Ûsomptueux que nous voudrions §Ütre connus de toute la terre, et m§Üme des gens gui viendront quand nous ne serons plus; et nous sommes si vains gue l'estime de cinq ou six personnes gui nous environnent nous amuse et nous contente." ("We are so presumptuous that we would wish to be known by all the world, even by those who will come after, when we shall be no more; and we are so vain that the esteem of five or six neighbours delights and contents us.")

Do not think that this "we" was said out of politeness, and that by this word "we" Pascal meant "they", that is to say others and not himself. No, it was of himself that he was speaking. When he wrote the Lettres Provinciales the opinion of five or six neighbours sufficed to make him personally feel that he was approved by the whole world, by the men of his own generation and of the future. If you do not believe this, read another extract where he expresses his thought with complete frankness, leaving nothing to the imagination:

"La vanit§Û est si ancr§Ûe dans le coeur de l'homme gu'un soldat, un goujat, un cuisinier, un crocheteur se vante et veut avoir ses admirateurs; et les philosophes m§Ümes en veulent; et ceux gui §Ûcrivent contre veulent avoir la gloire d'avoir bien §Ûcrit; et ceux gui le lisent veulent avoir la gloire de l'avoir lu; et moi qui §Ûcris ceci

ai peut-§Ütre cette envie..." ("Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a soldier's servant, a cook, a porter brags and wishes to have his admirers. Even philosophers wish for them. Those who write against it wish to have the glory of having written well; and those who read it desire the glory of having read it. I who write this have perhaps this desire.")

Here it is all clear beyond dispute: man does not write, speak, or even think with the purpose of finding out the truth. No one here is interested in the truth; what people want instead of the truth is a convenient set of judgments which can profit or suit the greatest possible number of men. We say advisedly the greatest "possible" number, so that if one cannot speak urbi et orbi, if it is impossible that Rome and the whole world should accept what one has to say, then the approval of five or six persons will suffice: for Pascal Port Royal, for Caesar some remote village. Thus the illusion of "semper ubique et ab omnibus" [always, everywhere and by all - AK.] is saved, and we can at least consider ourselves the upholders of an "ecumenical" truth.

In the Provinciales there is no word of the abyss. Pascal's sole object is to get reason and morality on to his side, the side of his friends at Port Royal. The Provinciales are, in general, quite up to the scientific level of their period, and historians look upon the Letters as a progressive production. I repeat that there is no trace of the abyss, and still less of any attempt to substitute the arbitrariness of a fantastic being.

That is why, properly speaking, we do not find the true Pascal and his "ideas" in the Provinciales. He exchanges polemics with the Jesuits, but, saying nothing about himself, he only castigates the ridiculous and revolting theses launched by his adversaries, or rather, the enemies of Port Royal. He hales the Jesuits before the judgment seat of common sense, of morality; if they are unable to justify themselves there, it proves that they are in the wrong and can have no more to say. He never suggests that it could be possible to be condemned in such a court and yet be in the right. Hardly a word, either, of salvation by faith and of his mysterious conception of "grace" which would make one turn one's back on all that men have held and hold true and reasonable. Such thoughts as these are all reserved for a future work, for that "Apology for Christianity" which, if Pascal had managed to complete it, would have answered its purpose even less than the Thoughts which have come down to us. When Pascal was writing his Pens§Ûes he forgot that here on earth men think and ought to think only of others. But this should not be forgotten in writing an apology; the object of an apology is to get "universal" concurrence; if not actual, at least apparent, if not of the whole world, then at least of five or six, of an intimate group. But a great proportion of the Pens§Ûes could not count on the concurrence even of such a limited number. We know that the book was strictly censored by Port Royal. Port Royal itself was unable to bear these new truths. And, indeed, an apology ought to be written by a man who has the solid earth and not an abyss beneath his feet; by a man who is able to justify God to Rome and to the whole world, and not by one who wants to bring the world and Rome before the judgment seat of God.

It is for this reason that Pascal's suggested interpretations of the revelation of the Bible were not only unacceptable to Rome, who acted as dictator to half if not the whole world, but also failed to please the little Jansenist community. They, though faithful to St. Augustine, or perhaps just on account of this very fidelity, had also, like Rome, their own pretensions to the potestas clavium. I have already said that St. Augustine never dared refuse to acknowledge the sovereign rights of reason, he was too utterly swayed by the traditions of Stoicism, and Neo-Platonism, which had completely and entirely accepted the ideas of Stoicism. Pascal knew this. He writes: "Saint Augustin. La raison ne se soumettrait jamais si elle ne jugeait qu'il y a des occasions o§ë elle se doit soumettre. Il est donc juste qu'elle se soumette quand elle juge gu'elle se doit soumettre." ("St. Augustine. Reason would never submit, if it did not judge that there are

some occasions on which it ought to submit. It is then right for it to submit, when it judges that it ought to submit.") These words, as one of Pascal's commentators has justly observed, are directly connected with the following passage from Letter CXX of St. Augustine: "Proinde ut fides praecedat rationem, rationabiliter jussum est. Nam si hoc praeceptum rationabile non est, ergo irrationabile est; absit, si igitur rationabile est, ut magnam quandam, guae capi nondum potest, fides antecedat rationem, procul dubio quantulacumque ratio, guae hoc persuadet, etiam ipsa antecedit fidem." ("It is thus a reasonable commandment that faith should precede reason. For, if this precept is not reasonable, then it is unreasonable; which God forbid! If therefore it is reasonable that faith should precede reason in certain great things, not yet comprehensible, so doubtless that little shred of reason which persuades us of this must itself precede faith.")

Pascal tries to adapt himself to St. Augustine, and repeats this thought under different forms. Thus: "Il n'y a rien de si conforme §Ñ la raison que ce d§Ûsaveu de la raison." ("There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.") And further: "Deux exc§Ús: exclure la raison, n'admettre que la raison." ("Two excesses: to exclude reason, and to admit nothing else.") And again, as though defying himself: "L'extr§Üme esprit est accus§Û de folie, comme l'extr§Üme defaut. Rien que la m§Ûdiocrit§Û est bon... c'est sortir de l'humanit§Û que de sortir du milieu." ("Excess, like defect, of intellect is accused of madness. Nothing is good but mediocrity. To leave the mean is to abandon humanity.") When Montaigne preaches: "Keep in the common path", etc., he speaks but as nature dictates. Montaigne's "philosophy", as he himself acknowledges frankly, is no more than a soft pillow to help him to sound sleep. He was elected by God Himself to hymn the "golden mean" which Aristotle, the father of "scientific" philosophy, bequeathed to humanity. But Pascal does not and will not sleep; the sufferings of Christ will not allow him to sleep until the end of the world. Can reason sanction, or even justify, so insensate a decision? Reason is but the incarnation of the "golden mean". And she will never, in any circumstances, abdicate of her own free will. She can be cast down by force from her throne, but she cannot be persuaded by argument, for is she not of her very nature the only source of all proof? And whatever St. Augustine may say to the contrary, least of all will she give up her sovereign rights in favour of her mortal enemy "faith". The best illustration of this truth is the famous dispute between St. Augustine and Pelagius, the dispute which formed the starting-point of all Pascal's researches.

What did the Pelagians want? One thing only: to "reconcile" faith with reason. But, as the reconciliation could not be genuine, they found themselves constrained at last to submit faith to reason. Their principle thesis was as follows: "Quod ratio arguit non potest auctoritas vindicare." ("What reason has proved faith cannot disprove.") In affirming this principle the Pelagians were only repeating the conclusions of Greek philosophy, or rather of all human philosophy, which for the first time in Europe had found itself confronted with the fatal dilemma: What should man do? Trust to innate and immutable reason which holds the eternal principles within itself, or acknowledge a power which is above reason, a power which is living and consequently fortuitous and capricious (for all that is alive is fortuitous and capricious)? When Plato declared that the greatest misfortune that could befall a man was to become a misologos, he was already saying what Pelagius was to say after him. This thesis had been bequeathed to him by his great and incomparable master Socrates. And not to him only; all the schools of Greek philosophy received the same legacy from Socrates: Trust in nothing and no one: everything can deceive; only reason will not deceive us, only reason can put an end to our unrest, can give us a firm ground, can give us certainty.

It is true that Socrates was not so consistent as is generally supposed. In certain important, very important circumstances ~f his life he refused to obey reason, and listened only to the voice of a mysterious creature whom he called his "daemon". Nor did he attempt to conceal the fact. It is equally true that Plato was even less consistent in this respect than Socrates. His philosophy always

borders on mythology and often slips into it. But "history" has not accepted Socrates' "daemon" and has cleansed Plato's philosophy from myths. The "future" belonged on the one hand to Aristotle, and on the other to the Stoics, those narrow followers of Socrates who in their narrowness appealed best to history, and gradually took possession of the mind of thinking man. The Stoics had taken from Socrates and Plato all that they could yield in defence of reason. And their main argument was the same as that which Socrates, wisest of men, recognized as such by God Himself, developed before his spellbound hearers a few hours before his death (the pagan God had given him, through his oracle, the keys of the kingdom of heaven). Socrates had said that the greatest misfortune which could befall a man was to become a misologos. Let him lose riches, honour, family, and fatherland - these are but trifles; but let him lose reason and all is lost. Friends, honour, riches, and fatherland are mere transitory things; someone, some chance has given them to us without consulting us, and can at any moment take them away, equally without consulting us. But reason was given us by none, it belongs neither to you nor to me, it is neither of our friends nor of our enemies, neither among our own people nor among strangers, neither here nor there, before nor after. It is everywhere and always, among us and above us all. We must learn to love it only, this eternal reason, always the same, subject to none; a man must see in it the essence of his being; then there will no longer be anything mysterious or alarming in this world which was hitherto so inexplicable and terrifying. There will no longer be any need to fear the invisible Master who was once the source of all good and the executor of human destiny. This Master was powerful and almighty as long as his gifts were esteemed and his threats feared. But if we decide to value the gifts of reason alone, to attach importance only to the praise or blame of reason, that by which nos laudabiles vel vituperabiles sumus (as the Pelagians said), and look on the gifts of the Master as indifferent, adiaphora - then who could measure himself against man - man who has emancipated himself from God? All the Hellenic schools are unanimous about this: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans (see Lucretius's De rerum natura), and the Stoics. Only the early and late Stoic schools concentrated too much on this thought, (especially the Platonic Stoics, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius), and underlined it, so to speak, too heavily, which is what human nature cannot endure; it dislikes the "too much" above all things.

Nevertheless Socrates and Plato are the fathers of the Stoics, and even Aristotle is as nearly allied to Stoicism as any of the pure Stoics. One may even say that it was Aristotle who supported and rescued that objective and autonomous reason which Socrates discovered. For it was he who originated the theory of the "mean", he who taught men the great truth that if one wishes to keep one's understanding intact one must not try it with questions beyond its power. Or rather, he taught men how to put any question in such a form that it should not infringe upon the sovereign rights of reason. For it was he who invented the fiction (veritatem aeternam) that questions which one cannot answer are questions without meaning in themselves, therefore unpermissible. From Aristotle till this day people have only asked questions on subjects on which reason allows questions to be asked. All the rest is adiaphoron to us, indifferent, as it was to the Stoics. The most remarkable exponent of the new philosophy, who considered himself with justice the continuer of Aristotle's work, made Stoic indifference towards everything that happens on earth the first and indispensable commandment of philosophy. In his Logic - which is also an ontology - he makes Horace's rule into a first principle: Si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinae. [if the heavens should crack over him, the ruins would strike him unafraid - AK.]

And not only Hegel, but any modern thinking man, if he will but speak frankly, must endorse Hegel's words. Otherwise expressed, what was true for antiquity is true for us, the thoughts on which we live are the thoughts of Stoicism. Let men and things pass away, kingdoms and peoples perish; let all things cease to be; it is all adiaphoron (indifferent), provided that no attack is made on the kingdom of the ideal, where reason and its laws hold undisputed sway. Reason was

before the world, and its ideal laws and principles are eternal; they come from no one. When reason decides pudet, let every one be ashamed; when it says ineptum, let every one be indignant; when impossibile, let every one bow to it. And against reason there is no complaint, no appeal; or, as Pelagius said: Quod ratio arguit, non potest auctoritas vindicare. And St. Augustine, as we have seen, speaks as Pelagius; even Pascal sometimes found that it was better to disobey his Lord than his reason. For the praise of reason is the supreme good that man can expect, either on earth or in heaven. And the condemnation of reason is the worst. Can it be otherwise? Can we overcome Stoicism in philosophy, can we reject Pelagianism? Can one transpose Pascal's words and say: The Lord commands more imperatively than reason? For, if you disobey reason you will only be a fool, but if you disobey the Lord you will lose your own soul.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Gethsemane Night

<< | >>

6

Pascal dared to do this, and herein lies the paradoxical character of his philosophy, herein also its strength and its great attraction. The praise and approval, the blame and reproaches of that reason qua nos laudabiles vel vituperabiles sumus, and which according to the doctrine of the Stoics and Pelagians was alone able to raise a man up or cast him down, suddenly became to him adiaphoron (indifferent).

The change of values is complete. According to the Hellenic conception the real was negligible, to Pascal the ideal. The summum bonum of the philosophers becomes the butt of his ceaseless and mordant sarcasm. "Ceux qui les croient, sont les plus vides et les plus sots" ("Those who believe in them are the most empty and foolish of men"), he says of the philosophers. And again, in particularly provocative and curt fashion: "Les b§Ütes ne s'admirent point. Un cheval n'admire point son compagnon. Ce n'est pas qu'il n'y ait entre eux de l'§Ûmulation §Ñ la course, mais c'est sans cons§Ûquence; car, §Ûtant §Ñ l'§Ûtable, le plus pesant et le plus mal taill§Û n'as son avoine §Ñ l'autre, comme les hommes veulent qu'on leur fasse. Leur vertu se satisfait d'elle-m§Üme." ("The brutes do not admire each other. A horse does not admire his companion. Not that there is no rivalry between them in a race, but that is of no consequence; for in the stable, the heavier and most ill-formed does not give up his oats to the other, as men would have others do to them. Their virtue is satisfied with itself.") This ideal of the Stoics - that virtue is its own reward - Pascal finds realized in the stable. St. Augustine, too, as we know, disliked Stoicism and belittled it on every occasion, in and out of season. If the words so long attributed to him: virtutes gentium splendida vitia sunt (the virtues of the gentiles are only splendid vices) - if these words are not his, he at least said the almost identical words, virtutes gentium potius vitia sunt (the virtues of the gentiles are rather their vices). Yet he never thought of seeking and finding the Stoic ideal among the animals. He was too much attached to ancient philosophy, and his Christianity was too much permeated by Hellenism.

Pascal himself did not find it easy to escape the ideology which governed his own day. He laughs at the Stoics, and is indignant at "virtue which is its own reward", or in modern phraseology "autonomous morality"; he thinks the place for this is in the stable, that it is suitable for horses but not for men. This d

id not prevent him from eternally repeating, "le moi est ha§ássable" ("the ego is hateful"), a principle in which Stoic morality is as plainly implicit as it is in the words of which Pascal makes such mock. For all morality, be it of Epictetus or of Marcus Aurelius, of Kant or of Hegel, is derived from the hatred of the human "ego". What does this mean? Is Pascal following Augustine and returning to morality and Pelagianism? Many critics think so, and would see in Pascal a moralist, but they are quite wrong.

He certainly inherited this idea of the hatefulness of self from ancient philosophy. Yet this hatred of the ego had quite a different significance for him than for any other philosopher, ancient or modern. His submission to fate is as unlike the submission of a Stoic as his asceticism which provoked, and still provokes, so much irritation even among his most ardent admirers. The Stoics persecuted the ego with genuine zeal, hoping to kill and annihilate it; for it was only by so doing that they could assure the final triumph of their principles and ideas. A principle can only gain a definite victory when no one any longer opposes or contradicts it. For who but the ego has wrestled so unintermittently throughout the ages against this principle? And what enemy has given it so much trouble and anxiety? The ego is the most irrational of all God's creatures; it is the incarnation of revolt. Pascal knows it, he does not forget the words "subjicite et dominamini" ("submit and have dominion") which God addressed to the first man after blessing him. Would he be prepared to deliver man into the power of dead, self-sufficient principles? Hear what he has to say:

"Quand un homme serait persuad§Û que les proportions des nombres sont des v§Ûrit§Ûs immat§Ûrielles, §Ûternelles et d§Ûpendantes d'une premi§Úre v§Ûrit§Û en qui elles subsistent et que Dieu, je ne le trouverai pas beaucoup avanc§Û pour son salut." ("Though a man might be persuaded that the proportions of numbers are immaterial and eternal truths, dependent on a prime truth in which they have their being, and which is called God, yet I think he would not greatly have advanced his salvation.") Thus speaks Pascal, while all modern philosophy, following in the steps of the old, has had but one wish since Descartes (even before him): to express the essence of creation in mathematical formulae.

One could not find a better definition of the ideal of modern philosophy than this: a single, immaterial, eternal truth, from which of necessity proceed many other truths, equally immaterial and equally eternal. It is true that even today, three hundred years after Descartes, men are still far from the realization of this ideal, but it is so dear to them that they reverence it and cherish it as though it had already been realized. "Nasciturus pro jam nato habetur." ("That which is about to be born is considered as already born.") But Pascal, who has brought this ideal before the supreme tribunal where neither our "miserable justice" nor our "incurable, presumptuous reason" is regarded, declares that though you might succeed in attaining to these eternal and immaterial truths, however well adapted to one another, yet their value would be nil. They would not help you to save your soul.

Reason and morality will of course protest: does a truth cease to be true because it is useless to the soul? Is there any one in the world so daring that he will refuse to obey reason and call justice "miserable"? Truth and morality are autonomous, and legislate for themselves. They are not subject, they do not obey; they command. They issue from that reason of which Pascal himself said that it was the most terrible thing to disobey it.

And what has set itself up against reason, against those eternal and immaterial truths? The soul. Again the same ego which Pascal, who passed through the school of Epictetus, taught us to hate. For it must be perfectly evident that nothing is better calculated to tame man's "egotistical" tendencies than immaterial and eternal truth as expounded by the philosophers; consequently, if one were to search everywhere for a principle which could curb the pretensions of rebellio

us individuality, one could not conceive of a God more capable of doing so than the Hellenic God as suggested to Pascal by the "philosophers". There could be no better "tamer" than the summum bonum of them all, especially Epictetus and his disciples, down to Marcus Aurelius, the imperial philosopher. For what the Stoics call living conformably to nature - t§Üi physei - means living conformably to reason, i.e. contrary to nature. The Stoics themselves would have approved of Pascal's iron girdle, which symbolized his willingness to submit his "ego" to one or more of the eternal and immaterial truths. The Stoics, like Pascal, saw plainly that unless the "ego" were first annihilated there could never be any unity or order. The human "egos" are infinitely numerous, each one considers itself the center of the universe and demands to be treated as though he were alone in existence. There can obviously be no way of reconciling these demands and satisfying them all. Until the "ego" has been abolished, there will always be chaos and ineptitude instead of union and harmony. The task of reason is precisely to introduce order into creation, and that is why it has the power to exact obedience from all. For this cause - again that there should be order in the world - reason has invented morality, and shares with it its own sovereign prerogatives. The ultimate fate of mankind is to prostrate itself before the claims of reason and morality, and to submit itself to their autonomous principles. And at the same time, this obedience constitutes our greatest good, the summum bonum.

I repeat that the philosophers taught all this and Pascal repeated it after them. But his method of following them is strange. While repeating the philosophers' words, he says exactly the opposite of what they teach. This peace which reason and morality bring to man does not interest Pascal in the least. To him it means the end, non-existence, death. Hence his strange "methodological" rule: Seek with lamentation. You will not find this in the handbooks of logic of Pascal's day, nor in modern works. On the contrary: The wise man must forget his desires, his fears, his hopes, and be prepared to accept any truth, though by its very nature it is absolutely indifferent to human needs. This is so self-evident that it is hardly mentioned in the Discourse of Method. It is true that we find in Bacon reflections on various kinds of idola which distort our objective investigations. But only Spinoza declares, as though answering Pascal, of whom he probably never even heard, with impatience and irritation: "Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere." ("Laugh not, weep not, be not wroth, but understand.")

Pascal makes quite other demands: you must positively laugh, weep, and grow wroth, else your search will avail you nothing. With what right does Pascal make these demands? Have they any meaning? The question is fundamental, for here lies the root of the whole difference between Pascal and modern philosophy. If you adopt Pascal's methodological rule you will have one truth, if Spinoza's rule, quite another. Spinoza's ideal was the "intelligence". And for Spinoza the ego was in fact always "hateful". For we must never forget that the "ego" is the most refractory, and therefore the most incomprehensible and irrational thing in the world. "Understanding" only becomes possible when the human "ego" has been deprived of all its individual rights and prerogatives, when it has become a "thing" or a "phenomenon" among the other things and phenomena of nature. The choice must be made: either the ideal and intangible order with its eternal and immaterial truths, that order which Pascal had rejected and whose adoption reduces the medieval idea of the salvation of the soul to an utter absurdity; or else the capricious, discontented, restless, yearning "ego" which always refuses to recognize the supremacy of "truths", either material or ideal. He who undertakes to achieve understanding must be like the Stoics and other philosophers of old, must flee the self, hate it and annihilate it in order to make possible the realization of the objective world-order. But he who, like Pascal, sees in "understanding" the beginning of death, and finds his vocation in the fight against death, cannot hate the "ego". In the "ego", and only in the "ego" and its irrationality, lies the hope that it may be possible to dissipate the hypnosis of mathematical truth which the philosophers, misled by its immateriality and eternity, have put in

the place of God.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Gethsemane Night

<< | >>

7

Indeed, Pascal takes great pains to prove to us that the "ego" is hateful; yet in reality he puts forth all his powers to defend it against the pretensions of the immaterial and eternal truths. His nail-studded belt is only a weapon in this battle, so are his illness and the abyss which his admirers would like to eliminate from his biography. One may say with some certainty that Pascal would have remained the Pascal of the Provinciales had it not been for the abyss. So long as a man feels the solid earth beneath his feet, he will not risk defying reason and morality. Only exceptional conditions of being can free us from the immaterial and eternal truths which rule the world. Only a "madman" declares war on this rule. Remember the "experience" of our contemporary Nietzsche who begged the gods for "madness", since he had to kill the law, or, to use his own words, to announce to Rome and the world that he was "beyond good and evil".

Only now can we understand the hatred which Pascal cherished towards Stoicism and Pelagianism, and at the same time we can see what drew him to St. Augustine, and past St.. Augustine to St. Paul, past St. Paul to what Paul found in certain passages of Isaiah, and in the Biblical story of the Fall. The same question which had confronted Luther a century earlier, presents itself to Pascal: Whence does salvation come to man? From his works, that is to say, from his submission to eternal laws; or from a mysterious force which, in the no less mysterious language of the theologians, is called the Grace of God? Luther's problem shook Europe and the whole Christian world. At that time it seemed that problems could no longer arise, that history had already long ago solved them all, had put an end to every problem that man could raise. Pelagius had been condemned a thousand years ago, Augustine was universally regarded as an incontestable authority.

What more could one desire? But in reality, as I said, the victory lay not with Augustine but with Pelagius; the world had agreed to exist without God, but it could not exist without "law"; it might respect St. Paul and Holy Scripture, but it had to live according to Stoic morality and Pelagian doctrine. This came out very clearly in the famous dispute on free will between Erasmus and Luther. Erasmus, with his peculiar subtlety and perspicacity, suddenly confronted Luther, in his famous diatribe, De libero arbitrio, with this terrible dilemma: if good works (that is to say, a life conforming to the laws of reason and morality) cannot save us, if we can only be saved by the grace of God, who at His own caprice and pleasure gives this grace to one and denies it another, then where is justice? Who then will trouble to lead a good life? How can one justify a God whose very principle is arbitrary caprice? Erasmus did not want to argue against the Bible or St. Paul. Like every one else, he condemned Pelagius and upheld Augustine's doctrine of grace, but he could not admit the monstrous notion that God is "beyond good and evil"; that our free will, our willingness to submit to law, would not be weighed in the balances before the supreme tribunal; that, in fact, man has no defence before God, not even that of Justice. Thus spoke Erasmus, and all men thought, and nearly all men still think, with him. One might even simply say: all men.

Luther replied to Erasmus's "diatribe" with his most powerful and terrible book, De servo arbitrio. In this book - a rare event in a dispute - Luther makes no effort to weaken his adversary's argument; he rather does all he can to strengthen it. He underlines the "senselessness" of St. Paul's doctrine of grace more deeply still. It is Luther who utters the sentiments of unequaled temerity:

"Hic est fidei summus gradus, credere illum esse clementem qui tam paucos salvat, tam multos damnat; credere justum qui sua voluntate nos necessario damnabiles facit, ut videatur, referente Erasmo, delectari cruciatibus miserorum et odio potius quam amore dignus. Si igitur possem ulla ratione camprehendere, quomodo is Deus misericors et justus est, qui tantam iram et iniquitatem ostendit, non esset opus fide."

("It is the supreme expression of faith to think Him merciful who saves so few, and condemns so many; to think Him just, who of His own will has made us of necessity damnable, so that, as Erasmus says, it seems that He takes pleasure in the tortures of the unfortunate, and is worthy rather of hatred than of love. If by any reason I could understand how this God, who shows so much evil and wrath, could be merciful, then I should have no need for faith.")

The "senselessness" and "injustice" struck fear into Erasmus. To Luther, on the contrary, as these words show they were a source of inspiration. Erasmus's opposition kindled in Luther the courage to speak out where he had formerly been silent. Luther, like Pascal, had his "abyss"; like Pascal he had fenced himself off from it for years with his "chair"; and his chair was "law". And his deepest and most terrifying experience was undoubtedly the sudden discovery that the law does not save, that it is no more than a slender spider's web, which has been temporarily spun across the mouth of the abyss to hide perdition. Luther was a monk, he had taken and conscientiously fulfilled the difficult monastic vows, in the hope that his "good works" would save his soul. But then, as he tells us himself, he suddenly realized that in taking those vows he had offended against the will of God and damned his soul eternally. This fact, this "experience", is so extraordinary, so unlike what generally happens to men, that many refuse to believe it, or else interpret it in such a fashion as to "reconcile" it with the usual view of man's inner life.

But one can - nay, one must - believe Luther. We have no right to reject an unusual experience, even though it does not agree with our a priori notions. I have already shown that Nietzsche underwent a similar experience, and from it he derived the idea of his "beyond good and evil", which is simply a modernized translation of Luther's sola fide. And unless we are much mistaken, St. Paul's vision on the road to Damascus was another instance of the same thing. To St. Paul, who was persecuting Christ in the name of the "law", it became suddenly clear that "the law entered that the offense might abound" (hina pleonas§Üi to parapt§æma). Oh, how precious are these "sudden" findings, and how little does philosophy know how to make use of them, thanks to its traditional methods and its fear of the irrational "ego"! It is difficult to realize the shock that a man experiences when he makes such a "discovery", and still harder to understand how he can go on living. Law and laws are the framework of the world; Horace, we may remember, declared with the Stoics: si fractus illabatur orbis, impavidum ferient ruinae; Hegel, too, boasts of being equal in courage to the pagan philosophers, and of remaining indifferent though the skies should fall on him.

But this is just what happened: the laws which upheld the skies crashed, also the laws which upheld courage and the pagan virtues. And are these virtues really virtues? Was not St. Augustine right to say: virtutes gentium potius vitia sunt. Horace and Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and our contemporary Hegel, were not at all virtuous men, worthy of our imitation. They should all repeat with Luther his confession, the terrible interpretation which he gives of his monastic vow

: "Ecce, Deus, tibi voveo impietatem et blasphemiam per totam meam vitam." ("Behold, my God, I vow to Thee impiety and blasphemy all my life long.") Submission to the law is the beginning of all impiety. And the height of impiety is the deification of the laws, of those "eternal and immaterial truths dependent on a single truth", of which latter Pascal has spoken to us.

But, we shall be told, in the Bible there were also laws; Moses brought the tables down from Sinai; what are they there for? Let Luther speak again; he will tell us what Pascal heard at the supreme tribunal whither he carried his appeal against Rome and the world:

"Deus est Deus humilium, oppressorum, desperatorum et eorum, qui prorsus in nihilo redacti sunt, ejusque natura est exaltare humiles, cibare esurientes, illuminare caecos, miseros et afflictos consolare, peccatores justificare, mortuos vivificare, desperatos et damnatos salvare, etc. Est enim creator omnipotens ex nihilo faciens omnia. Ad hoc autem suum naturale et proprium opus non sinit eum pervenire nocentissima pestis illa, opinio justiciae, quae non vult esse peccatrix, immunda, miser et damnata, sed justa, sancta etc. Ideo oportet Deum adhibere malleum istum, legem scilicet, quae frangat, contundat, conterat et prorsus ad nihilum reducat hanc belluam cum sua vana fiducia, sapientia, justitia, potentia, ut tandem suo malo discat perditam et damnatam."

("God is the God of the humbled and oppressed, of the despairing and of those who are utterly destitute; it is His nature to exalt the humble, to feed the hungry, to give light to them that sit in darkness, to console the poor and afflicted, to justify sinners, to raise up the dead, to save the despairing and the damned. For verily He is the Almighty Creator who has made all things out of nothing. But He is prevented from accomplishing His own natural functions by that most malignant of all pests, the imagination of righteousness, which will not allow that it is a sinner, unclean, miserable and damned, but will be holy, justified. Therefore God must bring that hammer, the law, to crush it, this monster, break it, smash it, and utterly grind it to powder, with its vain confidence, its wisdom, righteousness and power, till at last it learns from its own ruin that it is lost and damned.")

Such is the law and such the fate of that which the philosophers hold to be truth, eternal and immaterial and therefore ultimate and divine. And now Luther's conclusion: "Ideo quando disputandum est de justicia, vita et salute aeterna omnino removenda est ex oculis lex, quasi nunquam fuerit aut futura sit, sed prorsus nihil est." ("Therefore when we argue of eternal justice, eternal life, and eternal salvation, we must altogether turn our eyes away from the law, as though it had never been and would never be, but were nothing at all.") I cannot, unfortunately, quote all that Luther says in his commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, on St. Paul's words, lex propter transgressionem apposita est.

All his fight against Rome, in its unexampled tenacity, was a fight against the "law", against the "immaterial and eternal truths" which Catholicism could never renounce even after the condemnation of Pelagius. He himself knew better than his adversaries whither he was being led. He saw clearly that an abyss was opening beneath his feet which threatened to engulf him and the whole world. He knew as well as they that "the law" was the foundation of everything. And he wrote: "Nec ego ausim ita legem appellare, sed putarem esse summam blaspemiam in Deum, nisi Paulus prius hoc fecisset." ("And I should not have dared to describe the law thus, I should have thought it the supreme blasphemy towards God, if St. Paul had not done so before me.") But St. Paul himself was no less frightened by his discovery; he would not have dared to say what he did, had he not in his turn leant upon the prophet Isaiah, whose boldness terrified as much as it attracted him. St. Paul says: Isaiah dared to say, (H§Üsaias de apotolm§Ói kai legei): "I was found by those who did not seek me, I manifested myself to those who did not inquire after me." How can one accept such audacious words? God, God Himself violates

the supreme law of justice: He manifests Himself to those who do not inquire after Him, He is found by those who do not seek Him. Can one then exchange the God of the philosophers, the single, immaterial truth, for such a God as this? And was not the Renaissance right which turned from the God of the Bible, and Descartes who in fulfillment of the behests of his time tried to "dispense with God"? And is Pascal not an apostate, a traitor to all humanity, who summoned mankind before the tribunal of the Almighty? Where lies the truth? Which must we prefer?

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Gethsemane Night

<< | >>

8

We are now face to face with the greatest difficulties which the history of human thought knows. Even the framing of the question, as I have said, seems inadmissible. Which must we prefer? As though "objective" truth took any account of better or worse! As though it depended on man to choose between God, the all-powerful creator, who by His own free will called up the universe out of nothing, and the "law", that eternal and immaterial principle from which the universe and all its inhabitants spring with that natural necessity with which all the theorems in mathematics follow from its definitions and axioms. Has human "better" and "worse" any significance in the face of objective truth? And then, if one may ask this question, who shall answer it? Aristotle and Descartes, or Isaiah and St. Paul? Thinkers of genius and inspired prophets are alike men, and one cannot hand over to them, individually or collectively, the power of settling the fate of creation. There have been a great many thinkers of genius and inspired prophets, and how can we be sure that they will agree on one solution? They will certainly not agree; worse, they have already disagreed. To come to an agreement we should have to abolish all this "better" and "worse", which has been the principle of all disagreement and strife (like all human "egos"), and submit ourselves to the impersonal and dispassionate principle which stands above "better" and "worse", and at the same time has that absolute power which ensures it obedience in saecula saeculorum, even from the most recalcitrant entity. This is the way which the philosophers have chosen, and of course not without "sufficient reason". The praises and threats of reason had forced them completely to forget the existence of the Lord.

Pascal's case is quite different. He was not allowed to choose any more than were Isaiah or St. Paul. And he had no "sufficient reason" for his decision. At a certain moment, a force, an incomprehensible shock drove him in exactly the opposite direction to that favoured by men. And this shock, strangely enough, was nothing like what this word usually designates; and if we want to understand the "direction", we must forget the meaning formerly attached to that word. Let us call to mind what has been told us by Pascal's biographers and those who had some insight into his life, about his terrible, senseless illness, and his equally terrible and senseless abyss. His Jansenist directors themselves tried to heal him of his malady and to hide the abyss from him.

It seems that Pascal's illness and abyss were this strange shock, the saving gift without which he would never have discovered the truth. Pascal might have repeated with Nietzsche: It is to my illness that I owe my philosophy. His Pens§Ûes are only a description of the abyss. The great miracle of miracles is accomplis

hed before our eyes. Pascal grows accustomed to the abyss and begins to love it. The solid earth gives way beneath his feet, it is frightful, terrifying! He is without support, a precipice opens at his feet which threatens to engulf him, and in horror at inescapable destruction he cries in agony: "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" It seems that all is finished. And indeed, something has ended, but something has also begun. New and incomprehensible forces manifest themselves, new revelations break through. Solid support fails, it is impossible to walk as of old, therefore one must fly. Obviously the old immaterial truths, which a thousand years of human thought have welded into a compact whole, will not only not help a man in this case, but will hinder him more than anything else. They, these veritates aeternae, continue to repeat inexorably: that man of his very nature should walk and not fly, should incline towards earth and not towards heaven, and that there is and can be no good to be found where anguish and terror reign. And as the most terrible thing is violation of the "law" and disobedience to the sovereign autocrat reason, qua nos laudabiles vel vituperabiles sumus; we must give up these audacious attempts, and submit ourselves humbly to the inevitable, make a virtue of this humility, and see this virtue as our "supreme good". Man's supreme achievement is submission to the laws of reason and reason-born morality. God himself asks submission and obedience of man, first and last.

And Pascal is one of those few elect for ever incomprehensible to all but all men, who have felt, or to whom it has been given to feel, that submission is the beginning of all earthly horror and death. "The law entered that the offense might abound," says St. Paul; the law is only a hammer in God's hands that He may break man's assurance that living beings are ruled by eternal, immaterial, and sovereign principles. Or again: the law came when man, forgetful of good and evil, gathered and tasted its fruits - those innumerable "pudet" and "ineptum", "impossibile" which sustain the edifice of our knowledge. The light of knowledge, unknown before the Fall, brought man his limitation by showing him the pretended limits of the possible and the impossible, of what can and cannot be; the mysterious beginning and the inevitable end. While there was not "light" there was no limitation; everything was possible, everything was "very good," as it is written in the Bible; there were beginnings but no end, and the word "inevitability" had as little meaning as the word "liberty" has today. The light brought shame of paradisiacal nakedness with it, and fear of earthly death. It is impossible to "explain" all this to men. All explanations throw light, and light shows us precisely the things from which we wish to be delivered, against which we try to struggle. Descartes sought for the clear and the distinct, the old philosophers deified reason, and we all wish for clarity and follow reason which unveils every mystery save one - the existence of an abyss beneath our feet. Even Pascal's companions at Port Royal refused to accept the Biblical story of the Fall in all its mysterious fullness. They thought - and Pascal himself sometimes speaks in the same strain - that the sin of the first man did not lie in his eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

That was not an unfortunate, but, on the contrary, a fortunate occurrence, for knowledge is the summum bonum, the best thing in the world. The misfortune only arose because God had taken it into His head to forbid man to touch that particular tree. The original sin was Adam's disobedience. For God, like man, like those ideal conceptions morality and reason, which man has invented, can forgive anything except disobedience. So that if God had forbidden man to eat plums or pears, and had been disobeyed, the consequences would have been the same - illness, suffering, and finally death. And the seed of Adam would have answered for their disobedience as they are doing today. This is the usual interpretation of the Fall, since the Bible got into the hands of men educated in the Hellenic tradition. They want to see in God the "absolute" and "immaterial" principle which, like all the principles that we know, punishes automatically, therefore inexorably, any attempt by any living creature to refuse of its own free will to follow the laws which He has laid down. Thus the Bible is interpreted to this day, in spite of Isaiah's flaming words and St. Paul's inspired epistles. This need not s

urprise us. When reason came into the world through Adam's transgression, and became the interpreter of the Bible, it necessarily substituted its own truths for the strange truths of revelation. For even a revelation must be "reasonable". God Himself bows to the verdicts of reason, and finds in its approval His summum bonum.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Gethsemane Night

<< | >>

9

The most astonishing characteristic of Pascal's philosophy (that philosophy which is so unlike what commonly passes for truth among men) is the effort that he makes to free himself from reason. Bound though he was by Port Royal and the theological tradition which interpreted the Biblical legend of the Fall in Hellenistic fashion, conscientiously though he tried to give universal validity to all his statements (that is to say, to justify them before the tribunal of reason), yet his essential thought always breaks through the train of reasoning, like a sharp dissonance, as behooves an apologist who took for starting-point the fact that divine truth, like human truth, can be found in the "laws" to which all the "hateful egos" must absolutely submit. Even in the famous wager in which Pascal undertakes to prove mathematically that reason compels a man to have faith, even in this so scientifically constructed argument, Pascal, as though suddenly forgetting his design, pronounces the words which have scandalized so many: "Naturally this will make you believe and will brutalize you." And when his imaginary interlocutor replies: "That is what I fear", Pascal replies with a calm and tranquil look, as though it were quite natural: "Why? What have you to lose? What do you lose by giving up reason?" If someone else had said this, one would shrug one's shoulders and laugh. It is obvious that the man is an imbecile and a fool.

But it is not for nothing that Pascal's "brutalize" and "what have you to lose?" provoke so much alarm among our contemporaries, half drowsed and bewitched as they are by the charm of modern theories of knowledge. For in these words, as in Pandora's box, are contained all possible absurdities, and consequently, as we think, all horror. Open the box and suddenly all these non pudet, quia pudendum est, prorsus credibile quia ineptum, certum quia impossibile, will escape into the light of day, and with them the human "egos" which reason had kept in submission and silence, all those egos which Pascal himself feared and hated so greatly. Nevertheless Pascal apotolm§Ói kai legei (dared and spoke): he forgot all the terrors and threatening calamity and said what stands written. More accurately, he did not forget but defy them. No matter how much reason tried to pacify him, it was of no avail. Neither its praises nor its blame affected him. Whether it was what Plato called anamnesis or what we today contemptuously refer to as atavism; in any case, Pascal remembered the Biblical story of the Fall, and then reason's magic lost its power over him. Now he no longer fears, as others do, as he himself feared but recently, to pass as a fool; he laughs at virtue which is its own reward and at its faithful subjects the inhabitants of the stable. Remember how he recoiled from that single immaterial truth proclaimed by the Renaissance, his hatred for Descartes, and his contempt for the summum bonum of the ancient philosophers...

There is only one way to escape all these things: to renounce the veritates

aeternae, the fruits of the tree of knowledge; to "brutalize" oneself, to believe in none of reason's promises; to flee the light, for light illuminates the lie; to love shadows: "Qu'on ne nous reproche pas le manque de clart§Û, car nous en faisons profession." ("Do not reproach us with lack or clarity, for we make it our profession.") Inspired by the Biblical revelation Pascal has created a peculiar "theory of knowledge" which is completely contradictory to our idea of the essence of truth. The first axiom of knowledge is: any normal man can see the truth if it is pointed out to him. Pascal, for whom the Bible is the principle source of knowledge, declares: "On n'entend rien aux ouvrages de Dieu si on ne prend pour principe qu'il a voulu aveugler les uns et §Ûclairer les autres." ("One cannot understand the works of God, unless one takes it as a principle that He has elected to make some blind and to enlighten others.") Port Royal, of course, wanted to omit the word "voulu". I think that in the whole history of philosophy no one has ever dared to proclaim a "principle" more mortifying to our reason, and Pascal himself hardly went further in audacity except perhaps when speaking of the summum bonum of the philosophers and of the horses who realized the Stoic ideal in their stable. The fundamental condition of the possibility of human knowledge consists in the fact that truth can be perceived by any normal man. Descartes had thus formulated it: God neither can nor wishes to cheat. Pascal, on the other hand, maintains that God both can be and wishes to be a cheat. Sometimes, to certain people, He reveals the truth; but He deliberately blinds the greater number of them in order that they should not perceive the truth.

Who is right, Pascal or Descartes? Here is that hateful question again, which has already caused us so much difficulty: how are we to decide, or who is to decide for us where the truth lies? We can no longer inquire of reason, neither can we, like Descartes, address ourselves to morality; morality tells us that it would be unworthy of God to deceive man; but Pascal has told us the right place for morality is in the stable. We despair, and Pascal triumphs. That was just what he wanted. Drunk with joy, he can cry: "Humiliez-vous, raison impuissante; taisez-vous, nature imb§Ûcile; apprenez que l'homme passe infiniment l'homme et entendez de votre ma§àtre votre condition v§Ûritable que vous ignorez." ("Therefore let impotent reason be humbled, foolish nature be silent! Learn that man infinitely surpasses man, and hear from your master your true condition of which you are ignorant.") This is what Pascal wanted. He felt that "this fine, corrupt reason has corrupted all things", and that man's only chance of salvation lay in freeing himself from it. So long as reason remains that by which nos laudabiles vel vituperabiles sumus, so long shall we find in the praises of reason our summum bonum and our summum malum in its blame, and we shall not be able to free ourselves from our desperate situation. "La raison a beau crier, elle ne peut mettre le prix aux choses." ("Reason may say what it likes, it cannot fix the value of things.")

Reason creates out of her own truths an enchanted realm of lies. We are all living as though under a spell and we feel it; yet we fear the awakening more than anything in the world. And, blinded by God, or more properly speaking, by the "truths" which our ancestor plucked from the forbidden tree, we look on our efforts to remain in this sleep as the natural activity of our souls. We look upon those who help us to sleep, who lull us and glorify our sleep, as our natural friends and benefactors; while those who try to awaken us we look upon as our worst enemies, aye, as malefactors. We do not want to think and we do not want to study for ourselves, for we do not want to see true reality. That is why a man will prefer anything to solitude. He lives for his fellow-dreamers, in the hope that the "common dream" (Pascal did not hesitate to speak of these "common dreams") will help still more to strengthen his assurance of the reality of illusions. Consequently men hate Revelation above all things, for Revelation is an awakening, a liberation from the chains forged by "immaterial" truths to which the descendants of fallen Adam have grown so accustomed that life would be inconceivable to them without these chains. Philosophy sees the supreme good in a sleep which nothing can trouble, that is, a sleep without dream-faces. That is why it is so careful to get rid of the incomprehensible, the enigmatic, and the mysterious; a

nd avoids so anxiously those questions to which it has already made answer.

Pascal, on the other hand, sees in the inexplicable and incomprehensible nature of our surroundings the promise of a better existence, and every effort to simplify or to reduce the unknown to the known seems to him blasphemy. Remember what he said in his Pens§Ûes on the most various questions. No matter what the subject, it is plucked apart, torn asunder, loses all meaning and all internal unity: if Cleopatra's nose had been a little shorter the history of the world would have been changed; our justice is bounded by a brook, on the one side of the brook one is not allowed to kill, on the other side it is permitted; kings and judges are as futile as their subjects and prisoners, etc. And these are not just witty epigrams, the roots go down into the depths of his spirit. Pascal is really convinced, he "sees" that the history of the world is governed by tiny chances. Even if he lived today, when every one takes Hegel's point of view and sees world history as the development of the spirit, he would not deny his words, and if he and Hegel are anywhere confronted with one another (this is a hypothesis which we have admitted to be possible), then can we not be certain that the Supreme Judge will find more "penetration" in Pascal's one brief sentence than in all Hegel's fat volumes?

Is this unintelligible and repulsive to you? Yet, if you want to be one with Pascal, you have no alternative but to "brutalize" yourself and continually to repeat his incantation: "Humiliez-vous, raison impuissante; taisez-vous, nature imb§Ûcile." ("Humble yourself, impotent reason; be silent, foolish nature.") Our veritates aeternae are ignored before the supreme tribunal. It is there that Pascal derives the understanding and authority to turn his back on impotent reason and foolish nature. Hear what he has to say:

"Chose §Ûtonnante cependant, que le myst§Úre le plus §Ûloign§Û de notre connaissance, qui t celui de la transmission du p§Ûch§Û, soit une chose sans laquelle nous ne pouvons avoir aucune connaissance de nous-m§Ümes! Car il n'y a rien qui choque plus notre raison que de dire que le p§Ûch§Û du premier homme ait rendu coupables ceux qui, §Ûtant si §Ûloign§Ûette source, semblent incapables d'y participer. Cet §Ûcoulement ne nous para§àt pas seulement impossible, il nous semble m§Üme tr§Ús injuste ; car qu'y a-t-il de plus contraire aux r§Úgles de notre mis§Ûrable justice que de damner §Ûternellement un enfant incapable de volont§Û, pour un p§Ûch§Û o§ë il para§àt avoir si peu de part, qu'il est commis six mille ant qu'il f§ít un §Ütre ? Certainement, rien ne nous heurte plus rudement que cette doctrine ; et cependant, sans ce myst§Úre, le plus incomprehensible de tous, nous sommes incompr§Ûhensibles §Ñ nous-m§Ümes. Le noeud de notre condition prend ses replis dans cette ab§à ; de sorte que l'homme est plus inconcevable sans ce myst§Úre que ce myst§Úre n'est inconcevable §Ñ l'homme."

("Nevertheless it is an astonishing thing that the mystery which is farthest removed from our understanding, that is to say the transmission of sin, is one of the things without which we can have no understanding of ourselves! For there is nothing more shocking to our reason than saying that the sin of the first man made all those who came after him guilty, although they are so far distant from the origin of it that they seem incapable of having participated in it. This inheritance seems to us not only impossible, but also most unjust; for what can there be more contrary to our miserable apprehension of justice than to damn eternally a child who is incapable of free will, for a sin in which he can have no part and which took place six thousand years before he came into being? And yet without this most incomprehensible of all mysteries we are incomprehensible to ourselves. The kernel of our being is to be found in this abyss; so that man is even more incomprehensible without this mystery than this mystery is to man.")

It is obvious that the thought which lies at the back of this passage will not be counted by men as one of those eternal truths that are communicated to each and all by the light of reason. Pascal knows this well. He himself stresses the point that nothing can antagonize our reason and conscience more than the mystery

of the Fall and of original sin. Original sin presents itself to us as an incarnation of all that we look upon as immoral, shameful, absurd, and impossible; yet Pascal declares that the greatest truth lies just there. Like Tertullian or Luther, he plainly sees all the pudet, ineptum and impossibile which make up the Bible story; and yet Pascal declares: Non pudet, prorsus credibile est... and so forth down to the final word, the triumphant certum. Pascal's "conversion" is this very affirmation; the paper which he carried sewn into his garment proves it to us. In this paper he definitely separates himself from the Hellenic truths: "Dieu d'Abraham, Dieu d'Isaac, Dieu de Jacob - non des philosophes et des savants" ("God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob - not God of the philosophers and wise men"): thus does he express, in his brief, hastily scribbled words, the result at which he had arrived.

Here we have again the same "abyss", the same inextricable knot of irreconcilable contradictions. Everything is contained in it: the terrible words: My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me? the tears of joy, the doubts and the certainty. And above it all there is a single insane and passionate wish - the wish to forget the whole world, to forget everything except God; to forget laws, rules, the eternal and immaterial truths which philosophy has declared to be our summum bonum; to endure all physical and even moral sufferings in order to reach the end. "§«ternellement en joie pour un jour d'exercice sur la terre." ("Eternal joy for a day of trial here on earth.") The liberty forfeited by Adam and God's first blessing must be given back to the "hateful ego". And beside these great gifts of the Creator our earthly virtues and our "eternal truths" are as naught.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Gethsemane Night

<< | >>

10

Everything in Pascal has changed radically. Formerly he was afraid of "reason" with its decrees, and of conscience with its "inexplorable" judgments. Now decrees and judgments alike have ceased to exist for him. Perhaps one might express this even more strongly: Pascal evidently felt that what we all most need is just what reason and conscience forbid us. Perhaps we should make one reservation, to avoid the possibility of misinterpretation. We may remember that Pascal, unlike Descartes and other philosophers, did not understand by truth that which every one could see if it was once pointed out; he maintained that God so made the world that some men are ordained to see and others to remain blind. And the gift of sight or of blindness does not depend on our own will: God deceives those whom He will, and enlightens those whom He will, and we have no means of forcing God to show the truth to all men. Consequently truth has no need to hide from men. Truth wanders about among them, without disguise, and he who is not destined to see it will not see it, for he has no eyes for it.

It might not be out of place to remark here that Pascal's theory of knowledge is not so original as it appears to us at first. Not that Pascal had borrowed it; he invented it, or rather found it where no one else goes in search of a theory of knowledge: in Holy Scripture. But other philosophers, and heathens among them, had already divined the same thing. Plato told Diogenes that he had not the "organ" needful for seeing "ideas", and Plotinus knew that truth was not a "universally accepted" judgment. He taught that to be able to see the truth one mu

st be able to surmount these "universally accepted" things, to get "beyond" reason and knowledge. Plato and Plotinus said all this, but history has kept quite a different side of their teaching: Plato, as we may remember, has said that the greatest misfortune is to become a misologos (a hater of reason); and Plotinus: arch§Üi o§ín logos kai panta logos (in the beginning was reason and all things are reason). History has rejected the rest as useless to mankind, and although modern theories of knowledge are almost all based on Plato and strongly influenced by Plotinus, they take as starting-point Aristotle's dictum: that truth is that which can be shown to every one at any time.

But Pascal declares that we cannot understand anything of the works of God unless we bear in mind that He wishes to enlighten some and make others blind. Clearly, however, he did not say all that there is to say. It is apparent that God now enlightens, now makes blind, one and the same individual; sometimes man sees the truth, sometimes he sees it not. It happens fairly frequently that a man both sees and does not see at the same time. That is why in "ultimate questions", as Pascal explains to us, there is not, cannot, and ought not to be anything firm and certain, and that is why Pascal himself is a mass of contradiction. His thoughts, as he tells us, come and go according to their own caprice. In the middle of the systematic series of sober deductions of which his "wager" is built up, there suddenly bursts upon us the absurd saying about "brutalizing". On one page he glorifies reason, on another he puts it roughly and contemptuously in its place. And the "ego" which he declares hateful, of which he says that the "only virtue is to hate it", becomes the most precious thing in the world, much more precious than all the virtues, which Pascal abandons to the Pelagians and the denizens of the stable. The maxim: Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne conna§àt pas (the heart has its reasons which reason does not know), is in all his writing and produces the most unexpected and miraculous transformations. It is true that one might invert this thesis and proclaim with equal justice that "reason has its reasons which the heart does not know". And this is indeed so. Reason makes its demands without taking the heart into account, as the heart takes no account of reason. The heart - what is this mysterious heart? - says with Job: "Oh that my grief were thoroughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balances together! For now it would be heavier than the sand of the sea." Reason replies: "Sorrow, even that of the whole world, laid in the balance would not outweigh a single grain of sand."

Another question, and again we do not know who shall decide. Reason insists: "Man is but a weak reed lost in infinite space. A puff of wind, a drop of water suffices to kill him, as any one can see." "Yes," replies Pascal, "that is evident. But the wind and the water and even the entire universe do not feel their strength, nor the weakness of man, therefore their strength is illusory and null." Is this an argument? Can one dispute self-evident fact thus? Naturally reason rejects such as argument; it only recognizes the demonstrative force of those immaterial truths which neither the drop of water nor the puff of wind nor the whole universe could affect. For reason, "annihilation" is that before which it bows down in reverence, and before which, according to its laws, all must bow. It was reason which taught Pascal, and the ancient philosophers before him, that "the ego is hateful", for it is not eternal, it knows a genesis and a phthora, birth and death; and it is reason which inspired Pascal with the fundamental rule: Il faut tendre au g§Ûn§Ûral (one must strive after the general), which has served as basis of all philosophy, ancient and modern, and without which neither ethics nor theory of knowledge would be possible. But the "heart" hates the "general", and does not want to strive after it, no matter what the promises or threats of reason, just as it refuses to recognize reason as the supreme legislator.

Pascal appeals to the "truths" which he has discovered in the Bible to defeat reason and its demands. You think that it is self-evident that what has had a beginning must have an end, you think that death is as "natural" an event as any other. But your "self-evidence" is only self-deception. Descartes, in his lear

ned simplicity, imagined that God could not and would not cheat man, being forbidden by the pagan theory of knowledge and ethics. But we know that there is another theory of knowledge and another ethic, and that God can and will cheat man. And His greatest deception, of which even divine Plato was the victim, is to persuade us that everything which has a beginning has also an end, and that consequently death is a natural phenomenon amongst all the other natural phenomena. Certainly many things which have a beginning have also an end, but not all. And death, which reason "comprehends" as the necessary consequence of the principles which it has established, is as a matter of fact the most incomprehensible, the least "natural" of all that we see in the world. And it is even less "natural" that men have accepted the truths of reason to love the "general", and "laws", to hate their own "egos"; that they have been able to interest themselves so deeply in "immaterial" truths and forget so completely their own destiny.

"L'immortalit§Û de l'§Óme est une chose qui nous importe si fort, qui nous touche si profond§Ûment qu'il faut avoir perdu tout sentiment pour §Ütre dans l'indiff§Ûrence de savoir ce qui en est." ("The immortality of the soul is a thing of so much importance to us, which touches us so deeply, that one must have lost all feeling to be indifferent about it.")

And again:

"Rien n'est si important §Ñ l'homme que son §Ûtat; rien ne lui est si redoutable que l'§Ûternit§Û. Et ainsi, qu'il se trouve des hommes indiff§Ûrents §Ñ la perte de leur §Ütre et d'une §Ûternit§Û de mis§Úres, cela n'est point naturel. Ils sons tout autres §Ñ l'§Ûgard de tles autres choses: ils craignent jusqu'aux plus l§Ûg§Úres, ils les pr§Ûvoient, ils les sentent; et ce m§Üme homme qui passe tant de jours et de nuits dans la rage et le d§Ûsespoir pour la perte d'une charge ou pour quelque offense imaginaire §Ñ son honneur, c'est celui-l§Ñ m§Üme qui sait qu'il va tout perdre par la mort sans inqui§Ûtude et sans §Ûmotion. Cst une chose monstrueuse de voir dans un m§Üme coeur et en m§Üme temps cette sensibilit§Û pour les moindres choses et cette §Ûtrange insensibilit§Û pour les plus grandes. C'est un enchantement incompr§Ûhensible et un assoupissement surnaturel qui marque une force toute-puissante qui le cause."

("Nothing is so important to man as his existence; nothing so much to be feared as eternity. And therefore it is quite unnatural that there should be men indifferent to the loss of their being and to the danger of an eternity of misery. They think quite otherwise of everything else; they fear the smallest things, they anticipate them, they suffer from them; and the same man who passes so many days and nights in rage and despair over the loss of a place or for some imaginary slight on his honour, that same man knows without anxiety or emotion that he will lose everything at his death. It is a monstrous thing to see this strange sensibility about small things, this strange insensibility about great things, existing side by side in the same heart at the same time. It is some incomprehensible magic, some supernatural bewilderment which points to some almighty force as its cause.")

You see how everything is reversed with Pascal. The Greek ethics and theory of knowledge, with their dislike of anything irrational, with their affirmation that "the ego is hateful", with their inclination towards the "general", their belief in the "natural" character of death, lose all power over him. Where philosophy finds truth and proof Pascal finds only incomprehensible magic and supernatural bewilderment. And now we shall no longer dare to reject his adjuration, "Be humbled, impotent reason!" For if our "eternal truths" only lead to "magic" and "bewilderment", if we live in a realm of witchcraft, how can man free himself from these supernatural enchantments? We despise superstition, we are convinced that exorcisms are absurd - this is another of our "eternal truths". But this was only valid as long as our theory of knowledge and our ethics were founded on the supposition that God was just and would submit Himself together with man to the superior law. But if God wills that some should be blind while others can see, thi

ngs will assume quite a different complexion, and "incantation" appears as the only, though "supernatural", means of breaking through these "self-evident" fantasies created by an equally unnatural force. The search after truth can no longer be a calm and dispassionate affair. Henceforward we must admit that only those who "seek with lamentation" can hope to seek with success. For the abyss which ever haunts Pascal, and his frenzied fear of this abyss, ate more desired than firm ground and peace of soul. Nothing but the terror a man feels when he sees that he no longer has any firm ground beneath his feet and is sinking into the bottomless abyss can induce in him the "mad" resolve to reject the "law" and to set himself against all recognized truth.

That is why, in his Pens§Ûes, Pascal speaks so much of the terrible conditions of our earthly existence. Reason repeats its truths: A=A. The part is less than the whole. Two things which are equal to a third are equal to one another. Everything which has a beginning must also have an end, etc. Morality demands that virtue should be its own reward - that the human ego, which is essentially hostile to all law, should be brought to obedience - that God Himself should submit to the law... Pascal hears all this; he knows these things, he lived in both the secular and the spiritual Rome; he passed through the schools of Epictetus and Montaigne, as also through the school of Descartes with his more timid friends of Port Royal. He became familiar with all the immaterial and eternal truths and learnt to reduce them to a single truth which men call God; he learnt that there has never been any other God among men, and that "the power of the keys" was given by God Himself to him who denied Him thrice in a single night.

But before the last judgment-seat Pascal learnt something more. He prayed: "Faites (Seigneur) que je me consid§Úre en cette maladie comme en esp§Úce de mort, s§Ûpar§Û duonde, denu§Û de tous les objets de mes attachements, seul en votre pr§Ûsence" ("Grant, 0 Lord, that I may look upon myself in this illness as a dead man, separated from the world, shorn of everything I love, alone in Thy presence"); and in response to this prayer God sent him the "change of heart" which he had desired. "Alone in Thy presence"; from this wish to see God face to face (Plotinus's phug§Ü monou pros monon) comes the decision to hale Rome and the world before the supreme tribunal. This it was that raised him out of the common way; this gave him the strength and courage needful to speak so masterfully to reason which recognizes no other master than itself; this taught him to reply to the considerations of sound human understanding with that word of exorcism: "Humiliez-vous, raison impuissante." One can and one must sacrifice everything to find God; and the first sacrifice must be our "eternal and immaterial truths", which positive philosophy, in virtue of their actual immateriality and supposed eternity, would put in the place of God. This is what Descartes is not forgiven, and can never be forgiven; for it is through him that men were again made blind, and brought back to that magic and bewilderment of which Pascal tells us. How can the world be freed from this torpor, how can man be freed from the power of death? Who will breathe active force into the exorcism "Vanish!"? Who will help us to profess our "lack of definiteness"? Who will give us the great courage to abandon the gifts of reason and to "brutalize" ourselves? Who will make the sorrows of Job weigh more heavily than the sands of the sea?

Pascal replies: "J§Ûsus sera en agonie jusqu'§Ñ la fin du monde" ("Jesus will be in travail until the end of the world"). God Himself has added His own infinite sufferings to the sufferings of Job, and at the end of the world the sufferings of God and the sufferings of man will weigh more heavily than the sands of the sea. Pascal's philosophy, so unlike any which is usually called by that name, tells us not to seek strength or assurance in this bewitched world; for we must not rest, we must not sleep... This commandment is not for all, but only for certain "elect" or "martyrs". For should they in their turn sleep as the great apostle slept upon that memorable night, the sacrifice of God will have been in vain, and death will triumph definitely and for ever in the world.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances

<< | >>

Part III

ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

Here on earth everything has a beginning, and nothing an end.

- DOSTOEVSKY

VEHEMENT WORDSPlotinus's Ecstasies

Oh that my grief were thoroughly weighed, and all my calamity laid in the balances! For now it would be heavier than the sand of the seas; therefore my words are vehement.

- JOB, vi, 2 and 3.

1

"In so far as the soul is in the body it rests in deep sleep," says Plotinus (III,vi,6).

For a century past Plotinus's doctrine has been attracting increasing attention from philosophers. New works on Plotinus are continually appearing, and each fresh examination is another hymn in his praise. Some of his commentators do not hesitate to link him with divine Plato; hardly any one now doubts that his "doctrine" is that which is commonly called "philosophy" in the speech of today, i.e. primarily science - as no one doubts that Plato's "doctrine" is also science. The words quoted above: "Insofar as the soul is in the body it rests in deep sleep", are the key to Plotinus's philosophy. Is it possible to see in these words a scientific dogma? Can it be reconciled with all the other principles of the many and various sciences? In other words: will the law of contradiction, which has been invested with the supreme power of deciding the legality of human judgment, recognize this judgment as true and allow it freedom of movement among men with the other truths?

I have said that the above words are the key to Plotinus's philosophy; indeed, one cannot understand him at all unless one remembers continually in reading the Enneads that the soul, in so far as it is bound up with the body, rests in deep sleep. On the other hand, the whole life of all men, as daily experience teaches us, is not the life of souls that are freed from the body, but of souls which are indissolubly bound up with the body. And yet these souls, which are bound up with the body, think; they seek and find truths which do not at all resemble dream-pictures, and the law of contradiction and all the laws dependent upon it unhesitatingly grant to these truths the final sanction. The question arises: What is the relationship between the truths found by a soul freed from the body and those found by souls still unfreed? Can there possibly be any relationship between them? Do they see one another, do they recognize one another?

The Middle Ages raised the question of the two kinds of truth, the theological and the philosophical truths; they solved, or at least answered, this question in some cases as follows: what is true from the theological standpoint can be false from the philosophical, and vice versa. But the "standard theologian" of the Middle Ages did not admit such a contrast. Thomas Aquinas insisted strictly that truth, whether divine or human, is always alike. Principiorum naturaliter notorum cognitio nobis divinitus est indita, quum ipse Deus sit auctor nostrae naturae. Haec ergo principia etiam divina Sapientia continet. Quidquid igitur principiis hujusmodi contrarium est, est divinae Sapientiae contrarium: non igitur a Deo esse potest. Ea igitur quae ex revelatione divina per fidem tenentur non possunt naturali cognitioni esse contraria. (The knowledge of the principles known naturally to us is given us from God, since God is Himself the author of our nature. Therefore, divine wisdom also contains these principles. Thus whatever contradicts such principles, contradicts also divine wisdom: it cannot, therefore, be from God. Therefore, that which is believed on the strength of divine revelation cannot contradict natural cognition.) In other words, the fundamental principles of our cognition and of divine cognition are the same. This law is proved by a whole series of "igitur" ("therefores"), i.e. through the means or method of the same cognitio naturalis (natural cognition), the legitimacy of which was doubted and required justification. The infallible dialectician seems, therefore, to have fallen this time into a petitio principii so glaring that even a hasty and superficial reader would notice it.

It is also true that the doctrine of two-fold truth is equally vulnerable. It is clear to any one that one and the same man cannot at the same time accept two mutually exclusive laws. If theological truth says that God created the world in six days, while philosophic truth assumes that the world has always existed, it is not possible that both philosophy and theology should be speaking the truth. Either philosophy or theology is mistaken. For it is naturally quite unthinkable that the law of contradiction, the most unshakable of all laws, should permit even one single exception; and here it is not a question of one exception, but of an infinitely great number. The Bible, the primary source of theological knowledge, contains an uninterrupted story of events which must from the standpoint of a reasonable man be considered senseless and unnatural. Must we then reject the doctrine of two-fold truth and return to the doctrine of the "standard theologian"?

Ea quae ex revelatione divina per fidem tenentur non possunt naturali cognitioni esse contraria. (The truth of revelation and the truth cognized in natural wise cannot contradict one another.) It is still less possible that in face of any revelation, be it never so sublime, the law of contradiction, that supreme judge over life and death, should agree to abdicate the sovereign rights which it has acquired, God knows when and why. But let us turn back to Plotinus. Plotinus lived in a comparatively late age, when the "light from the East" had become accessible to the whole Graeco-Roman world. Nevertheless the Bible was for him a book like other books, and he could see in it no revelation. Does this mean that the question of two-fold truth did not arise for him? That he, in other words, did not feel the possibility of such sources of cognition as are closed to "natural" understanding, and reveal truths which are incompatible with the truths discovered in "natural" wise?

The words quoted at the beginning of this chapter show us that this was not the case. Plotinus recognized truths which we, whether we will or not, must call revelations, which are entirely strange to the modern consciousness and even excite the highest degree of indignation. And now the main point: when Plotinus had to decide between "revealed" and "natural" truths, he unhesitatingly took the side of the former; ha gar hegeitai tis einai malista, ta§íta malista ouk esti (V, v, 11) (that which appears most real to common consciousness has the least existence). And here the "common consciousness" is by no means the consciousness norm

al to other men, to the mob, to§às pollo§às, even as the truths acquired with the help of the common consciousness are not truths only admitted by the mob. No, Plotinus himself, like all other men, is generally in the power of these truths, and only occasionally feels within him the strength to free himself from them. "Often I awake from my body to myself (pollakis egeiromenos eis emauton ek to§í s§æmatos) and turn my attention away from the outer world to my inner self; then I behold the realm of wondrous beauty and gain the assurance that fate has destined me to a higher lot (t§Üs kreittonos moiras einai). Then I live a higher life, I unite myself with God, sinking myself in Him, and reach exaltation above all that is comprehensible through the understanding" (IV, viii, 1).

Just as with Pushkin, who, of course, did not know Plotinus. So long as Apollo does not call the poet to the holy sacrificial altar, he, like all other men, is wrapped up in the vain business of the world and is the most insignificant creature (Pushkin here uses a stronger and more truly adequate expression than Plotinus), among the other insignificant creatures of our world. And only in the rare moments when the divine voice sounds in the poet's sensitive ear, his soul, which had grown heavy in the world's business, soars like an eagle suddenly awakened towards the realm of wondrous and incomprehensible beauty, which common cognition holds for "essentially not-being". When Pushkin speaks thus, we hold his words for metaphor, or we even repeat silently with Aristotle: "Poets lie too much." But Plotinus is no poet, he is a philosopher whom even the present day awards a place of honour in the pantheon of the great searchers after truth. Are we to say of him too: "He lies too much"...? Or are we to do as has often been done with Plato: strike out all admissions of this sort and leave only the "well-founded", proven sentences? And are we to replace the awakening of which he speaks so often and so enthusiastically by another less daring word?

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Vehement Words

<< | >>

2

One thing is sure: in Plotinus, as also in some important representatives of the Middle Ages, theological truth or the truth of revelation is at irreconcilable enmity with philosophical truth, or science in the usual sense of the word. But another thing is sure also: in contrast to the thought of the Middle Ages, Plotinus never expresses his thought on the mutual relationship between these two truths with the clarity and decision which would be desirable. He speaks of this as though there were no question, as though no question were possible, or as though this question answered itself. In the sixth Ennead (ix, 3, 4) he writes: "Whenever the soul approaches the Formless (aneideon) it fears lest it be confronted with "nothingness" (eksolisthanei kai phobe§àtai, m§Ü ouden ech§Üi), being unable to grasp it, because it has no definition and no marks of a special type - and it flees. Before such phenomena it becomes uncertain and withdraws into lower spheres... The main ground of our uncertainty comes from the fact that the comprehension of the One (i.e. the truth of revelation) is not given us through learned knowledge (epist§Üm§Ü) and also not through thinking (no§Üsis) like the cognition of other ideal things (ta alla no§Üta) but through a communion (parousia) which is something higher than knowledge. When the soul acquires scientific cognition of a matter, it departs from the One (again meaning, from the truth of revelation) and ceases to be

One; for every scientific knowledge presupposes a ground, and every ground presupposes a multiplicity (logos gar h§Ü epist§Üm§Ü, polla de ho logos).

This means that Plotinus is unfaithful to the fundamental command of his divine master, in that he abandons the logos (reason) and becomes in Plato's phraseology a misologos, a hater of reason - for Plato taught that to be a misologist is the greatest misfortune that can befall a man. Plotinus himself has said: In the beginning is reason and all is reason (arch§Üi o§ín logos kai panta logos: III, ii, 15) - and his disciples and successors have repeated these words again and again.

If, then, reason is the ground of all things and all things are reason, if it is the greatest of misfortunes to renounce reason and to hate it, then how, one wonders, could Plotinus exalt with such enthusiasm his "One", and deep participation in it. And what has happened to the law of contradiction, which is also an arch§Ü (beginning, fundamental principle), indeed, a bebai§ætat§Ü t§æn arch§æn, the most unle of all fundamental principles? I think that this question can in no wise be evaded; I think, too, that Plotinus's modern commentators are wrong in trying so hard to prove that Plotinus never renounced reason, and that when he thought and wrote down his thoughts he never turned his gaze away from the law of contradiction. It seems to me that old Zeller saw more clearly and came nearer the truth when he declared fearlessly: "It is in contradiction with the whole trend of classical thought and a decided approach to the spiritual methods of the East when Plotinus, like some Philo, can find the final purpose of philosophy only in a contemplation of the divine in which all decision of thought and all clarity of self-consciousness vanish in mystical ecstasy" (V, vi, 11). In another passage Zeller expressed himself more sharply still: "The philosopher (viz. Plotinus) has lost absolute confidence in his thought" (V, iv, 82). Zeller is undoubtedly right. The same Plotinus who extolled reason and thought so often and so passionately has lost his trust in reason and become, in spite of the Platonic tradition, a misologist, a hater of reason.

A fact of the highest importance. And it is very regrettable that Zeller, who observed this extraordinarily rare phenomenon, yet failed to contemplate it more closely, to penetrate it more deeply, contenting himself with the traditional reference to Philo's influence and eastern ways of thought. I will not go here into the question of whether Plotinus knew Philo and whether he was initiated into the secrets of Oriental wisdom; not because I have no space, but because I consider this question useless and purposeless. Even if Plotinus did know of it, he knew also of the classical philosophy. He "knew" much more besides, and of course he knew very well what Plato says about the misologos and Aristotle about the law of contradiction, on which alone all clarity and certainty are based and the strength of which rests again on clarity and distinctness. What could have given him the audacious thought of refusing obedience to the supreme ruler, bebai§ætat§Üi t§æn arch§æn, the unshakable principle? How could he forget Plato's warning and abandon himself to the miserable existence of a misologos? Can he really have been persuaded to this by Philo's writings or the words of the Oriental sages?

Such explanations are the regular thing in the history of philosophy. In my opinion, however, they would only be appropriate if the history of philosophy took for its task the study of the works of mediocre and untalented philosophers. For such philosophers a book which they have read does in fact determine much or even all. But it is quite improper to speak of the influences of ideas on Plotinus. Plotinus's "ideas" spring directly from his own spiritual experiences, from his fate, by virtue of what he saw with his own eyes and heard with his own ears. And if he dared to fight against the law of contradiction and condemn himself to the lot of a misologos, this was by no means because someone had somewhere committed such an act of daring before him. There were much deeper and far more important reasons at work here.

Porphyry, Plotinus's pupil and biographer, who is at pains, like all devoted pupils and biographers, to ensure for his teacher the admiration and honour of the later world, tells us many details of his life. Plotinus was very unselfish, very honest; he was a very clever and astute man. He enjoyed in the fullest degree the love and confidence of his fellow men, and was, therefore, often chosen to be guardian of young orphans, appointed arbitrator, asked for his advice in difficult cases, etc. And those who applied to him were always satisfied. The property of the minor remained intact; a senator who was suffering from gout was relieved of his pain; once a rich lady who had been robbed of her valuables actually succeeded, thanks to Plotinus, in learning who had been the thief. We may assume that everything that Porphyry tells us is true. Plotinus was certainly not seduced by the riches entrusted to him; his advice to the senator and the lady was probably sound. No doubt men who knew him believed, like his conscientious biographer, that these practical virtues were intimately connected with his philosophy. It is even extremely probable that the reason why his philosophy was so highly esteemed was because it was, as they say, justified by the philosopher's life.

The same story was repeated of Spinoza in modern times. His philosophy, too, impressed many people primarily because he led a moral life. But it would certainly have been impossible to find among Plotinus's contemporaries in Rome, perhaps not many, but some dozens of men who would have administered the property of others no less conscientiously, have given equally good advice, and possessed a faculty of observation as keen as Plotinus's. In seventeenth-century Holland, too, people could have been found no less unselfish, modest, and "quiet" than Spinoza. But they were no philosophers. It might have been better if we had been told less about Plotinus's and Spinoza's virtues. Their virtues sank with them into the grave, but their works have lived on. They are what we have to decipher, and they are not made less enigmatic through the narratives of their biographers. These narratives help us as little as the references to the influence of Philo Judaeus or the eastern sages.

The same Porphyry tells us - quite incidentally, as though it were not worth mentioning - that his master never read through what he had written. And again, as though Plotinus's future readers were not to ponder too much on this peculiar quality, he adds as explanation: He did not read, because he had weak eyes. I cannot understand how this explanation can satisfy any one. If Plotinus had weak eyes, there were plenty of his pupils and friends there with good ones. Porphyry himself, or others, could have lent their master their eyes. But it seems that Plotinus needed neither his own eyes nor those of others. It was not necessary, it was not commanded to read through again what had once been written down. Did this never enter conscientious Porphyry's head? And yet it is the only possible explanation. Plotinus did not read what he had written down, because he was unable to think out, or to repeat twice, one and the same thing. In fact, we have just heard from Plotinus that "what matters" (to timi§ætaton), which formed the subject of his philosophy, could endure no definition, as on the other hand our ordinary thought endures no formlessness. When the soul approaches reality it is seized with horror, it seems to it that it is sinking into "nothingness" and perishing. And conversely when we try to catch the last, supreme reality in the nets of our definite and clear formulae of ready-made familiar categories, it slips through those meshes, like water through a fisherman's net; before our eyes it turns into a dreadful "nothingness". It was not because his eyes prevented him that Plotinus did not read through his writings; he could only write down what he did if he himself had never again to read it, for if he had resolved, or had for any reason been forced, to read through what he had written down, then he himself would have had to pronounce upon himself the judgment which Zeller passed on him fifteen hundred years later; he would have had to tell himself that he had lost trust in reason.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Vehement Words

<< | >>

3

It might be said that my suggestion, far from removing the difficulties of understanding Plotinus, rather to some extent emphasizes the impossibility of removing them. Plotinus was only able to write what he did if he did not read through again what he had once written - then what are we, his remote readers, to do? To understand Plotinus's thought we have to study his writings, to read them not once but many times, and to seek precisely for that definition which he tries in all ways to avoid. In other words, to study Plotinus means to kill him, and not to study him means to renounce him. What is to be done? how can we find a way out of this absurd position? Manifestly there is only the one way out which he found himself: even if we have good eyes, we must read his writings, but not re-read them. We must, therefore, seek in him no unity of thought, no power of conviction, no marshalling of truths. We must suppose that all the "proofs" which he gives in his writings are only his inevitable tribute to the scholastic tradition.

Plotinus was "professor", no "writer", and was, therefore, bound only to say what all those who learnt from him by attending his classes or reading his books could and must recognize. He was also a great philosopher, and therefore his thoughts must also preserve their force through centuries and even thousands of years, and to compel all to submission; for in this and this alone, in the force and ability to compel, to subdue, to conquer, do we all see the fundamental mark of true genuineness of thought. For this reason every thought seeks and strives for precision: for one can submit only to strict and limited requirements; and conversely, where there is no strictness or precision, there can be no word of compulsion; there begins the realm of freedom which no longer differs from the arbitrariness so hated by man. Thus it is not necessary to read through again what has once been written down, for there is also no necessity to impose on oneself or others a repetition of what has once been said and to do away with "contradictions" in one's statements. Knowledge, epist§Üm§Ü, is there the logos; but the logos is the treacherous multiplicity which pursued Plotinus all his life.

Naturally, too, the word "multiplicity" has not the definiteness in Plotinus which is forced on it by those who, against his will, or, if you like, in defiance of his behest, ceaselessly "read through" (study philologically) his works, and endeavour to make his philosophy the property of all humanity. Like nearly all expressions used by Plotinus, this word can "admit" various interpretations; or rather, it has not one meaning but several. How could this be otherwise, when, on the one hand, Plotinus's task consisted of expressing the "inexpressible", and on the other hand, his "system" tried to combine all the elements out of which Greek philosophy had grown up in its thousand years of existence? The "inexpressible" can only be expressed, for those who take it seriously at all, if the words which veil it are as changeable, as ambiguous, as transitory as itself. Is not then any attempt, such as was made in Plotinus's school, to "reconcile" Plato and Aristotle, or Plato and the Stoics, a renunciation, from the outset, of any "doctrine"? Was not Plotinus's teacher, the porter Sakkas, quite right when he forbade his pupils to disseminate his teaching? And did not Plotinus himself, who infringed his master's prohibition, tell us that there lay a very deep significance in the rule of the Eleusinian sages only to reveal mysteries to the init

iated? And yet he permitted his pupils to publish his works, which he had never read through and would certainly never have written down if he had remained true to himself; and in fact, he only began writing after the completion of his fiftieth year.

How are these contradictions to be resolved? But, indeed, it is doubtful whether they should be resolved in every case. Naturally, if one wants to see in Plotinus a "teacher", which he also really was, then one must attempt a solution, or at least pretend to attempt it. But supposing we disregard his work as a teacher, together with the virtues and talents of which the devoted Porphyry tells? It is often just as profitable to forget a thing as to remember it. Suppose we assume that all the information which has come down to us was untrue, that Plotinus never taught any one, never was guardian to any one, administered no property, cured no senators, etc.? That he was not particularly anxious to reconcile Plato and Aristotle; that these activities represented precisely that "multiplicity" so remote from and so alien to Plotinus; that all this is the sleep of the soul still wholly sunk in the body, and that Plotinus's true task in life did not consist in sleeping himself and letting others sleep; but he could only devote himself to his true task in rare moments (not at all often - pollakis - as he says himself), when he, without knowing why and how, "suddenly" (eksaiphn§Üs) approached That which all our knowledge declares to be pure "Nothingness"?

All this has, of course, nothing in common with the doctrine of Plato or the philosophy of Aristotle, still less with that of the Stoics. For all this is not in the first instance a "doctrine" at all, i.e. a science based on sufficient reason. Thus it comes that the succeeding generations, in so far as they have made Plotinus their own, have appropriated precisely something that is not present in Plotinus at all. One can, of course, repeat words and sentences, or even write out whole pages and chapters of the Enneads, as the famous Fathers of the Church and mystics did. Historians can take this occasion to write essays on Plotinus's historical significance, and the mockers can remark that the Eleusinian and other mysteries are no longer mysteries.

But all this should not confuse us. The essence of mystery lies in the fact that it cannot be revealed, or rather, that even when revealed it does not cease to be mystery. Plotinus's historical significance is also illusory. He was, and could be, only influential in so far as his words were interpreted in accordance with the transitory needs and requirements of this or that historical epoch. And human needs and requirements do not consist in awaking from sleep. On the contrary, men wish to sleep and seek to put away all that could disturb peaceful sleep. It would be most convenient to remove the contradictions between the teachings of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. For contradictions excite, awaken, recall what one would fain forget... And that is why so much is said about "the positive tasks of philosophy", and that, too, is why all philosophers, not merely talkers who have made a profession of philosophy, but also genuine philosophers like Plotinus, are forced to present themselves to men as teachers; in no other way can they achieve justification of themselves before their contemporaries and posterity.

But now, Socrates, whom Divinity itself declared the wisest of all men, called himself a gadfly, a spur (myops); in other words, he saw his task, not in soothing his fellow men with ready-made solutions of all the mysteries and all the riddles of life, but rather in taking peace away from those who had succeeded by their own forces in seeing in life no riddles and no mysteries.

Socrates' words: "I know that I know nothing", are not, as we were taught, "irony"; neither does the god's commandment at Delphi, "Know thyself", mean that it is given to man to know himself. In Delphi men were offered not solutions of old riddles, but new riddles; every one knew that, and yet in the crises of their lives they questioned the oracle, as though a mysterious force were leading t

hem thither where they would be still more confused. Finally, Socrates' daemon was also, of course, the incorporation of the "irrational residue", and might have proved to those who saw in Socrates the all-knowing master that not only the beginning, but also the end of philosophy is not rest, but unrest. The judges who tried Socrates' case were manifestly well aware whom they had to try, and in this respect showed themselves considerably more perceptive than our contemporaries who try to whitewash Socrates from the accusations leveled against him, or in extreme cases, endeavour, like Hegel, to see in "Socrates' fate" an unavoidable stage of the dialectical development of the idea.

All this is not as the historians explain it; on the one hand it is all much simpler, on the other hand much more incomprehensible. It is simpler in so far as Socrates was really guilty of that for which he was prosecuted; he did really corrupt the youth and refused to recognize the gods which the Greeks worshipped. Not only he corrupts youth who accustoms it to idleness, drunkenness, etc.; there is a kind of "corruption" which evokes far more violent resistance than drinking and doing nothing. The rejection of the traditional worship of the gods is also compatible with a genuine and deep endeavour after the mysteries of another world. Socrates in his defence made no attempt to justify himself against the accusations brought forward; he calls himself a gadfly, he appeals to his daemon, not to the gods to whom his fellow-citizens sacrificed. But Anytus and Meletus never suggested anything else; if it was now our task to revise Socrates' trial, and if we also had the assurance that an acquittal would awaken him to life and make it possible for him to poison our existence as he poisoned that of his contemporaries, we should without hesitation pass the same sentence on him as was passed two thousand five hundred years ago. Incidentally, we should convince ourselves that, in spite of Hegel, "the spirit" has not developed or progressed in this long period. What men have always chiefly feared and fear to this day is "unrest". Men have always destroyed daemons and gadflies, and will always destroy them as unsparingly as they can.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Vehement Words

<< | >>

4

I think that it will now no longer seem so remarkable to us that Plotinus wrote nothing down before his fiftieth year and that when he had once begun to write he did not read through what he had written. I think, too, that we shall now understand why Porphyry, Plotinus's pupil and friend, who was so intimate with him, could and would see nothing extraordinary in these peculiarities of his master. The mysteries of philosophy are revealed only to the "initiated". And the chief, the least comprehensible mystery obviously lies precisely in the fact that the ultimate, and perhaps also the penultimate, truth is not attained by us as the result of methodical thinking, but comes unexpectedly from without, like a sudden (eksaiphn§Üs) illumination.

If this is so, if philosophic truth is not attained through meditation, then it can in no way be "learned". It can also not be tested in any way; and more: we have no assurance that this truth, like the truths which can be attained by meditation, is always the same for all, or even always for the same man. It may be that Plotinus when he "touched" or "participated in" his ultimate truth saw n

ow one thing, now another. It is true that he says nothing of this; on the contrary, he expresses himself in such a way that one might believe that things were quite different, that instability was a mark of the phenomena of the empiric world, while in the super-empiric and only real world everything was always consistent and changes impossible and unimaginable. But if this were so, why are all words and conceptions which we have inapplicable to the truly real world? Since Socrates our conceptions have been shaped as though they were meant to express the immutable, and not the mutable. Even Parmenides esteemed in knowing (epist§Üm§Ü) the possibility of seeing behind the mutable phenomena the immutable essence; this was also the view taught by Plato. Plotinus, too, who in this respect followed the tradition of Parmenides and Plato, held all that is mutable for not being, and being for immutable. The very fact that he calls the final and deepest principle "the One" seems to suggest that in his eyes mutability was something evil, a lack of existence. How can one maintain that when he united himself with his "One" he was experiencing different things at different times? Would not this be to distort his "system"?

It is undeniable that everything that I am saying here fits but ill into Plotinus's system; but it may not be our task at all to find a system in Plotinus. A system is epist§Üm§Ü and epist§Üm§Ü is logos. But we know that Plotinus's last endeavour waprecisely to free himself from the power of the logos. This is perhaps the most remarkable characteristic of his writings; yet, contrary to Zeller's view, we have to see in this endeavour no break with ancient philosophy, but rather an all-embracing and bold expression of the tasks which the philosophy of the Greeks had set itself, but in consequence of the eternal law of fate or of history had not carried out. Parmenides, Socrates, and Plato strove no more than Plotinus for epist§Üm§Ü or logos; Plato himself, who esteemed the logos so highly, was a natural misologist; for what is logos, what is epist§Üm§Ü, what is the scientific philosophy which Zeller accuses Plotinus of betraying?

Let us recall again what we said above about theological and philosophical truth. Some believe that the Middle Ages in drawing this distinction were secretly endeavouring to turn aside from theological truth in order to open the path to "free inquiry". No doubt some philosophers of the Middle Ages did make attempts to exploit the doctrine of twofold truth in this way; essentially, however, it is something else. One may certainly feel the limitations imposed upon one by membership of a certain profession as a constraint; but this does not mean that liberation from theological truth would lead men to freedom of inquiry. I believe that the doctrine of the two truths sprang from the dream of quite a different freedom, that freedom which Plotinus proclaims.

Theology constrains man by imposing upon him unimpeachable dogmas. But does not science constrain man? Will it ever renounce its dogmas (postulates)? Will it ever agree to free man from the "law" of contradiction? Will it ever admit that the part is equal to the whole? Will it ever break away from the principle that ex nihilo nihil fit? Or that one can make undone a thing once done? The "standard theologian" who declared with such conviction that there could be no contradiction between the divine and the human understanding condemned man to twofold slavery; he became at the same time subject to the dogmas of Catholicism and to the "truths" of Aristotle. And those who today, starting from the thought of the unity of philosophy and science, wish to reconcile them with one another, are doing exactly what Thomas Aquinas did; they are not serving the liberation of humanity, but its enslavement. Our task seems to be not to reconcile science and philosophy but to sunder them. The deeper and more bitter the enmity between philosophy and science, the more humanity will win by it. I think that if Socrates were to come back to life today he would see that he must turn himself again into a gadfly, and this time he would turn the whole force of his irony upon those who wish to reconcile philosophy and science. I think, too, that in view of the endeavours predominant in our times his unrest would be far more unremitting still than in his first life. He would be forced to remember the doctrine of twofold

truth, but not in order to give "freedom" to scientific researches, but rather to free himself from scientific postulates. His daemon, to whom power was given to command without in any way justifying his commands, would have demanded from him first and foremost open warfare against scientific philosophy.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Vehement Words

<< | >>

5

Socrates' decision to set his daemon with its enigmatic "suddenly" (eksaiphn§Üs) in the place of the logos and the physik§Ü anank§Ü was, of course, the first step towards a breach with scientific philosophy. He would have been answered that men - if each man were to appeal to his own daemon - could never agree together, and that a senseless chaos and an intolerable discord would arise in place of the compelling unity and the necessary concord which he strove to attain in his first life. Such a reply would have seemed quite unanswerable to the Socrates of two thousand five hundred years ago. He might even have decided to abandon his daemon, or at least to relegate it to the background. This daemon is precisely the "unrest" which so distinguished Socrates from his contemporaries, and also from his successors. But in the two thousand five hundred years of his life in the world beyond, outside history, Socrates has presumably learnt a good deal; perhaps the doctrine of the twofold truth has been revealed to him in the other world, and perhaps also the doctrine that even in our empirical existence the truth cannot and will not be one alone; in other words, that truth tolerates no unity, even as it tolerates no immutability.

The basic quality of truth from beyond, i.e. metaphysical truth in our world, is the mutability so feared and shunned by man, and the incessant unrest bound up with this mutability. Therefore, I repeat, philosophy can never reconcile itself with science. Science aims at self-evident truths and finds in them that "natural necessity" which, after having proclaimed itself for ever eternal, claims to serve as the foundation of all knowledge and strives to rule over all wanton "suddenly". But philosophy has always been, and will always be, a fight with and a conquest of self-evident truths; philosophy is not looking for any "natural necessity", it sees in naturalness and in necessity alike an evil magic, which, if one cannot quite shake it off (for in this no mortal has ever yet succeeded), yet one must at least call by its right name; and even this is an important step! Accordingly the theory of knowledge, in so far as it is philosophy, strives, if not openly, at least in secret, not to justify positive knowledge but to chasten it. Almost every philosopher has kept himself a Deus ex machina, small, perhaps, but sovereign, for emergencies. Even the care-free Epicures speaks, it seems to me, with ill-concealed exultation of the barely perceptible but yet arbitrary and entirely ungrounded deviation of the atom from its "natural" direction. The deeper and bolder a philosopher's knowledge has been, the more he has mingled the wormwood of the problematic and inexplicable with the honey of comprehensible knowledge; thus even the Stoics, who have usually been held for materialists and rationalists, yet not only never rejected the "miraculous" but sought and even performed miracles just like the other schools of philosophy.

I will quote here a small section out of Epictetus's Diatribes, in which the essence of Stoicism is expressed more accurately than in Seneca's interminable

writings, or in all the meditations of the Stoics that have come down to us. Epictetus says: "Verily this is the wand of Mercury; all that thou touchest with it will become gold. Give me what thou wilt and I will turn it into a Good (ho theleis phere, kag§æ auto agathon poi§Üs§æ). Bring hither sickness and death, poverty and suffering, condemnation to death; through the magic wand all this shall be turned to profit." (Diatr. III, 20.) So Epictetus could speak at times, and herein lies the ultimate meaning, the heart's ambition of Stoicism. Not only Epictetus, not only the Stoics hold this view of the tasks of philosophy. The fundamental problem of philosophy has always been an ontological one. Philosophers have always rebelled, openly in antiquity and secretly today, against the role of outside "observers" assigned them by the uninitiated. They have wanted, like Epictetus, to do miracles, to create supreme values out of the useless, the waste stuff of life, even out of absolute nothingness itself. Every one knows that poverty and sickness, condemnation and death are matter out of which nothing can be created; that is so apparent, so undeniable a truth that only fools or madmen could contest it. Epictetus, however, who, of course, knows very well what "every one thinks, says fearlessly that every one is wrong, and declares solemnly that he possesses Mercury's wand through whose touch the ugliest and most frightful of things is turned into beauty and "the good".

I have mentioned several times, but I think it well to repeat once more, that the history of philosophy has always underestimated the importance of Stoicism. It is, indeed, impossible to name any philosophic system the basis and deepest roots of which are not Stoic. In speaking of truth, all philosophers have aimed at almighty power; all have sought after Mercury's wand, whose touch changes any object into pure gold. In this respect Plotinus is much nearer to Epictetus than to Aristotle or even Plato. Plotinus, too, has as his first aim to break through the walls of self-evident truth and reach the open spaces of free creation; this is why ethics and theodicy take so prominent a place in his writings. Ethics in Plotinus, as in Epictetus and modern philosophy, is the doctrine of the possibility of an unmotivated action, or rather of an action without a cause; for that reason ethics has always wished to be autonomous; it does not recognize the "law" of sufficient reason, it has its own "law".

Usually men bring their actions into harmony with the conditions of their existence: man has a natural desire to be healthy, and therefore chooses the nourishment suitable to his health; man wishes to be rich, and therefore, he works in the sweat of his brow and saves for a rainy day; man wishes to live long, therefore he avoids dangers, seeks strong friends and allies, etc. The Stoics and Plotinus after them reject all these "therefores" with scorn; they refuse to accept health, riches, etc., everything by which the actions of men are directed, as sufficient "reason". Other "fools" direct themselves by these things and see in them a "good" because they themselves can create no goods and receive them ready-made from nature's hands. Epictetus points out again and again that everything not done by man is indifferent to man; only what man himself creates, which is therefore in his power, is important. In his "doctrine" that the soul must liberate itself from the body in order to awake to freedom, Plotinus obviously agrees with Epictetus; he, too, refuses to accept a ready-made "good" from nature or even from the hands of the gods; man must create his own good, and what he cannot himself create has no value. Like Epictetus, Plotinus despises not only riches, health, and honour, but also friends, kinsmen, and even his fatherland; he is inexhaustible in proofs that all these things are no goods, but illusions, and that only the folly of man could hold illusion for reality.

Interesting, too, is the following argument in Plotinus's ethics, which is also closely akin to the line of argument of the Stoics, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and others. He accepts without hesitation the principle that the whole is more than its parts, and deduces that if we wish to understand life, we must look on the world as a whole without considering the fate of the single individual. Then that which seems valueless or bad to us becomes valuable and good, even as

a picture cannot consist of bright and shining colours alone, or a play of virtuous and noble heroes alone; unimportant and ridiculous characters must also come on the scene. This favourite argument of the Stoics' was taken over whole by Plotinus and occupies a central place in his "system". The fates of individual men do not interest him; or rather, according to his doctrine, they should not interest any one. When a solemn procession moves upward to the temple and treads a toad under foot on the way, because it was too cumbrous and heavy to escape in time, is that a reason for perturbation? And suppose it is not a toad but a man - perhaps Job in the Bible - would there be any more "reason" for perturbation? There can be no question of it. Our inquiry must be directed quite differently. We must consider not individual cases but the general, the whole. Then we shall attain what is most necessary; then we shall get Mercury's wand and do miracles; we shall transform poverty, banishment, sickness, and death itself into good. Then ethics will replace ontology and we shall be able to forget Job and his "words that are swallowed up".

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Vehement Words

<< | >>

6

Now I think it is time to recall Pascal and his considerations on Epictetus. Epictetus was the philosopher whom Pascal loved best. He esteemed in him the man who had grasped the idea of duty better than any other. In so far as Epictetus preached submission to fate and readiness to accept from the gods, without murmur, the difficulties of life, Pascal was altogether on his side. Yet something repelled him from Epictetus. And this "something" he called, in a very strong phrase, "superbe diabolique". We may, I think, assume that Pascal found this "diabolical pride" in the words which I quoted above. Epictetus believed that he was the most modest of men, and that his gift of working miracles, far from being in contradiction with his general doctrine of our duties towards the gods, grew, on the contrary, logically and naturally out of his doctrine. Our duty, our very first duty, was to live "in accordance with nature", and thus he who lives in accordance with nature achieves most. The teaching of Plotinus appears at first sight to be the same. For him too the miracle of final union with God is only possible for those who by katharsis, by faultless fulfillment of supreme duty, have put their souls in a state in which the barriers which divide man from the higher world drop away automatically. To be able to perceive supreme beauty our soul must first itself become beautiful. And just like the Stoics, Plotinus sees katharsis in liberation from the power of the body. And Plotinus - I emphasize this now because it is of decisive importance, hymned his miracle of the final liberation and union with God incomparably better than Epictetus his Mercury's wand. But they were both seeking the miracle. The manner of seeking was the same with both; both were convinced that it is only after overcoming the self-evident truths transmitted to us by the senses that we can attain the last freedom, the freedom of creation out of nothingness which Epictetus calls the good and Plotinus union with God.

Pascal did not know Plotinus; but I think that if he had known him, he would have spoken of superbe diabolique in his case also. And he would have kept this opinion, even if his learned friends from Port Royal had pointed out that St. Augustine himself had been unable to withstand the charm of the last great Greek

philosopher, and that the works of the leading Fathers of the Church and of the incomparable mediaeval mystics are full of Plotinus's spirit; he would - strange as it may seem at first sight - have cried out with fear and horror that behind this lies without doubt an "enchantement et assoupissement surnaturel"; in other words, that the ambition entertained both by the Stoics and also by the Neo-Platonists and the Early Fathers and mystics who were influenced by Greek philosophy, of overcoming self-evident truth, has been transformed by supernatural force into its contrary. Both Epictetus, who believed that he possessed Mercury's magic wand, and Plotinus, who thought that after liberation from the body he would climb up to heaven and unite with the Divine Essence, were victims of their pride. They wanted to be as God and to create out of nothingness; and they created out of nothingness and thought that their creation could be ranked with God's creation or even above it.

How could so mad a thought occur to man, and above all, to men like Epictetus and Plotinus? Is it not clear that a supernatural force is at work here? And is it not clear that in all this what should interest us most is not so much Epictetus's and Plotinus's unusual "achievements", but rather this unknown and obviously supernatural force which condemned the highest efforts of such notable men to fruitlessness? Epictetus and Plotinus triumph; they think that they have at last overcome the unrest instilled into them by Socrates, that they no longer need to seek with unrest, but may extol and preach. Plotinus seems even to have forgotten that he has renounced reason, and hopes with the help of this very reason to change the visions granted him at particular moments into general and necessary judgments accessible to all men at any time. Perhaps Plotinus himself did not want this. Perhaps it was only his pupils who demanded it, because it was only under this condition that they could learn anything from him.

It was Porphyry and all those who studied Plotinus's published works who sought and found in him general and necessary judgments. Of himself we know from Porphyry's testimony that he never re-read what he had written down; he suspected that if he read what he had once written, repeated what he had once said, his "truth" would become a "judgment"; and every judgment is the death of truth. And he could have repudiated responsibility for what his pupils or "history" have made of his achievements; he aimed at liberation from the power of the Greek ideas, which were dictated by reason; for the ancient world knew no salvation outside reason. He knew, as we have seen, that epist§Üm§Ü and logos mean multiplicity, or, expressed in modern language, in Zeller's lucid phrase, he had lost absolute confidence in reason. He saw that reason had the power to destroy the world, that it could indeed "prove" the deception and illusory existence of all things, but that it had not the power to create anything out of nothing, for reason has above it the ineluctable law: ex nihilo nihil fit.

It seems therefore that in his battle against self-evident truths Plotinus directed his attacks against the wrong quarter; he was absolutely right in saying that human souls are in a state of sleep; equally right was his violent struggle to awake out of that sleep. The ceaseless unrest which filled his soul is still perceptible to us in the inner enthusiasm which shines through his works. But he, like Epictetus and all other philosophers, in so far as they speak to man, are forced to begin with the supposition that everything here on earth has a beginning and an end. But unrest is only the beginning, the beginning which must lead before our eyes to some end; for like the laws of ex nihilo nihil fit and "the whole is greater than the part", so too the law that everything which has a beginning has also an end, is a fundamental principle of reason. These are all self-evident facts which cannot be contested; for it is also axiomatic that one cannot aim at the impossible.

Finally, one more self-evident law which is of especial importance to us here: philosophy must teach man, in no other way can it justify its existence. So Socrates, too, thought. He called himself a gadfly, declared that his role consi

sted, so to speak, in stinging men up, in transmitting the unrest of which he could not free himself. But even Socrates could not confine himself to this role; even he was burdened by the self-evident truths, which he did not dare attack. He awakened and stung men, but he also promised them truth, a new world, where none would sleep but all wake; in other words, he promised to free the old world from the magic of the evil powers.

Epictetus was not the first to proclaim that power was given him to transform the ugly and terrible into the good and beautiful. It was Socrates who, seduced by the words of the Delphic god that he was the wisest of all men, dreamed, first of the philosophers, of his omnipotence. Apollo seduced Socrates, and Socrates seduced the next generation of Greek philosophers; it was he who, as Plato bears witness in the Apology, said in his defence that, contrary to self-evident truth, no one could do harm to a good man. Moreover, Socrates demanded that his assertion of his should be recognized as reasonable, i.e. as universally valid, necessary, and more self-evident than daily experience; for that experience teaches us, as Spinoza says, that success and failure fall in equal measure to the just and the unjust. Epictetus in his fiery outcry was only pouring new life into an old thought of Socrates'. Plotinus also, when he wished to teach men, sought the truth from Socrates; in his Enneads (III, ii, 6), he repeats this phrase of Socrates' word for word.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Vehement Words

<< | >>

7

Plotinus's assertion that the soul, in so far as it is in the body, rests in deep sleep, now acquires a new meaning for us; Plotinus, like his great predecessors Epictetus, Plato, and Socrates, felt that we must awake out of something, overcome some self-evident truths. We must discover the magician who holds the souls of men under his spell. Where is he? How fight against him? One might think that one should begin first by fighting against the Logos and freeing man from the power of the ideas which dominate him; for our confidence in self-evident truths is precisely the "sleep of the soul" which hides within it the danger of transition to not-being. Ancient philosophy, however - and Plotinus forms no exception here - has never taken up arms openly against self-evidences. Modern philosophy, even in the shape of those of its representatives who, like Plotinus, have lost complete confidence in reason, is still living today on the Greek tradition and shows the same indecision; for is not to fight against self-evidence to foredoom oneself to failure?

I quoted a saying of Spinoza's that daily experience teaches us that success and failure fall in like measure on the just and unjust. Are these words correct? They contain an objective truth known to mankind for many thousands of years past; but can we admit this truth? We have just heard from Socrates that no one can do harm to a good man. How reconcile these two mutually contradictory assertions? For in our world, in which the law of contradiction is omnipotent, they cannot exist side by side. Either the truth of daily experience will devour Socrates' truth, or it will be devoured by it; the same is true also for a whole series of other truths for which there is no salvation possible either in dream or in reality. From these truths we cannot awake; they have permeated our whole bein

g; the animate and the inanimate world are in their power. What are we to do? How accept the inacceptable, overcome the invincible? There was only the one answer, which Socrates gave to the Cynics and which the Stoics exalted into a theory. The inevitable and the invincible must in some way be recognized as acceptable; or, as Epictetus says, "Give me what thou wilt, and I will turn it into a good." The philosopher becomes a worker of miracles; he must become one! Not among the Stoics alone, as is usually assumed, but in all systems of antiquity and modernity ethics becomes the fundamental and central part of philosophy, which in its turn feeds all the rest, even ontology.

What then, is ethics? After all that we have said no one will deny that ethics at the present time, as also in the past and the future, is the art of performing natural miracles, i.e. miracles which agree with reason and submit to the necessity which reason recognizes in the world order. Read Epictetus' Diatribes or Plotinus's Enneads, and you will be convinced; then, too, you will understand why Pascal speaks of Epictetus's superbe diabolique, and feel how significant is the specific gravity of his exclamation: "The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but not the philosophers' God." Pascal too sought the miracle, the "natural miracle" awakened in him the whole force of his imagination, but not because he feared any "contradiction" in this combination of words. Epictetus really felt the contradiction to be intolerable to the human soul (p§Ósa de psych§Ü logik§Ü physei diabebl§Üt pros mach§Ün - II, 26). But Pascal knew that there are things in the world which are even more intolerable to us than outer or inner contradictions; he knew, too, that the conception of a supernatural miracle is just as contradictory as that of a natural miracle. We must assume he had his reasons for rejecting the miracles of philosophy and preferring to them those of the Bible. Or can he have made his choice arbitrarily, without reason? Did it suddenly become clear to him that there are times when the absence of a reason is, as Bergson says so well, better than any reason? Did he then first attain "sight" by suddenly convincing himself that all our reasons, all our self-evidence, are nothing but a mere assoupissement et enchantement surnaturel?

Here seems to lie the opposition in principle between Pascal and the traditional philosophy, an opposition which Pascal himself did not succeed in expressing quite sharply enough in those Pens§Ûes of his which have come down to us. Mill says somewhere that if, every time that we had two objects and added two to them, some being secretly added another object, we should be convinced that twice two is five. And Mill is right; or rather, he was expressing, without knowing it, a very profound thought. For does it not continually happen indeed that when we have two things and add two to them five comes out? Someone inserts the fifth. Men, however, do not notice the person who inserts it, and simply "conclude" that in some cases twice two is five. Bergson expressed this thought recently by saying that scientific thought eschews everything "new". Every time that any one inserts something new, we try to explain it, to behave as though nothing new had occurred. For by the doctrine of reason, which starts from self-evident truths, or from the idea of natural necessity (which is the same thing), everything new is audacity, something that ought not to be, something contradictory to reason or irrational. And consequently, there is nothing new, for nothing is that cannot be.

Why does this happen? Why has man such fear of the new, as though it were Plotinus's "nothingness"? I think only one answer is possible; the possibility of a "new" thing takes out of man's hands the wand of Mercury, which gave him the imagined power of performing natural miracles. The new is the completely unexpected, the unforeseen and unforeseeable; the new is something completely unlike anything which was before; it is something that does not submit to man and to the magic wand of which Epictetus dreamt. And yet the "old", that which is known to man, was once itself "new", once appeared in the world without asking man's permission or awaiting the beckoning of his magic wand. Thus the old New, just like the new New, once appeared "audaciously" in the world, without asking permission

of reason and of man, the bearer of reason. Now we have this "new"; what of it? If we recognize the old New, shall we not have to recognize the new New also? Reason will never contradict itself, never diverge from consistency!

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Vehement Words

<< | >>

8

It is clear from what we have said that there is nothing original or significant in Plotinus's ethics and theodicy. Nevertheless his "historical significance" has always been based upon them. The Middle Ages and modern times, up to our day, intoxicate themselves with the ideas of the Stoics transmitted through Plotinus. St. Augustine and Master Eckehardt, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hegel, like the philosophers living today, all feel the more or less clearly expressed conviction that we must content ourselves with natural miracles, since the supernatural are impossible. This thought is, of course, never expressed in these words. The proof of the impossibility of the supernatural miracle is not generally connected in any way with the assertion that we must content ourselves with natural miracles. Even among the Stoics the words which we quoted about Mercury's wand are isolated. The theory of knowledge, i.e. the doctrine of objective truth, is usually worked out quite independently of ethics and theodicy, the purpose of which is the justification of the world and the Creator.

Yet it is not for nothing that so much is said of the "unity" of the philosophic outlook. Ethics has always been indissolubly bound up with the theory of knowledge; it proceeded from it and was conditioned by it. When that theory set out its principle of natural necessity or the impossibility of the miraculous, nothing remained for ethics and theodicy except to offer in place of the impossible supernatural miracles their own natural and possible miracles. Self-evident truth shows that two idlers, Anytus and Meletus, poisoned Socrates, whom Plato calls the best of all men, and the Delphic god the wisest of all men. Man cannot alter this, for as reason tells us, what once has been done cannot be undone. Reason, and surely reason alone, knows what is possible and what impossible. And it knows, too, that our business is only to strive for the possible and not to yearn after the impossible. There is nothing left for ethics but, having taken over ready-made reality from reason, to declare that that reality never existed; that it is not even reality but only appearance; that genuine reality is not that which is given to man, but that which man himself creates. For, as the Stoics taught, only that which we have in our power is of value to us, while everything which we have not in our power is indifferent to us and is thus as though it did not exist for us; or more simply still, as though it did not exist at all.

Let us stop for a moment and ask ourselves again: How was it possible for ethics to appropriate the rights of ontology? In other words, how does it create its natural miracles? Wherein lies the secret of Mercury's wand? This is, after all, not a secret which may not be revealed; the Stoics' miracles also are natural miracles, and their mysteries do not fear the light of day. There is nothing in the Stoic doctrine which has to be hidden from the uninitiated. Even Plotinus, who knows that a mystery can never become a universally accessible truth, is as clear and honest in his ethics and theodicy as the Stoic sages. To work miracles, he teaches, one has only to deny the body; not only one's own body, but the

whole physical world. The world of bodies is not subject to man. We cannot make lonely Socrates become stronger than Anytus and Meletus, with the Athenians who stood behind them. We cannot make the blind to see, the deaf to hear, conquered conquerors, the dead to live, etc. But we can, as the Stoics teach, say to ourselves: It is one to us whether we are blind or see, conquered or conquerors, whether we live or die. All this does not touch us, but only our bodies. Even if the fatherland perishes, we can say that it is one to us. Everything that happens in the physical, sensuous world is indifferent to us. The human soul is not called on to obey but to command. The Good is independent and follows its own laws. The Good does not acquire its principles from the outer world, it subjects the outer world to its principles. All impressions coming from without are only messengers (angeloi) who report what happens; but the soul is the king (basileus), to whom supreme power is given to rule over all. But if this is so, if the power to bind and to loose belongs to the soul, whom or what should it fear ? There is nothing in the universe which he need fear whose soul has denied the physical world.

Both for the Stoics and for Plotinus it was absolutely self-evident that battle against the "natural necessity" which the world begets is vain. We can only fight against the human ego, against our valuation of that which is given us. We grumble, are angry, rejoice, weep, triumph, despair, hope, etc., according to whether fate brings us success or failure. Every one believes that this must be so and cannot and ought not to be altered. But this is just what can and must be altered. We only need to transfer that which men treasure or fear into the sphere of the indifferent and we turn ourselves from slaves into kings, from men into gods. The free being, king or God, takes and expects nothing from any one. He fears neither poverty nor sickness nor banishment, nor even death. The toad is crushed, Socrates is poisoned, the fatherland perishes; all that must be so, it does not touch the sage and does not affect him. The magic wand works its natural miracles and the reasonable man despises the words which Job in the Bible pours out in the belief that his sorrow could in some supernatural balances prove itself heavier than the sand of the sea. "Was wirklich ist, ist vern§înftig." ("What is real is rational.")

I keep on speaking of Plotinus and Epictetus as though I were identifying Stoicism with Neo-Platonism. I think this should have been done long ago; not, of course, an identification, but a much closer assimilation than has hitherto been usual. The "doctrines" of the Stoics and of the Neo-Platonists spring without any doubt from the same root. Philosophy has always been, as I have said, struggle against and conquest of self-evident truths. But each time that a philosopher has had to choose between self-evident truths which have to be overcome and those which can be accepted, the basic trait of our nature has shown itself: the mistrust of the creative forces, i.e. of the possibility of anything new and unaccustomed in the world. Hence the enmity between "revealed" truth and "scientific" truth. According to Thomas Aquinas, God Himself can achieve nothing which does not accord with the principles of human reason. Ex nihilo nihil fit; accordingly that which is has always been, and nothing will ever be added to that which has been. Therefore, only natural miracles are possible and God Himself, as Spinoza proved so brilliantly in his Tractatus Theologico-politicus, can only be a natural miracle created by man. But since man can only create "ideal" entities, only principles and ideas, then God Himself, whom man has created, must be a purely ideal entity.

Man has no power over the world of realities; not merely can he create no single living creature, he cannot even call into being a lifeless thing, not even an atom which barely achieves reality. Thus God too can create nothing; the world exists of itself from all eternity, in virtue of the same "natural necessity". Yes, but does the world exist at all? Is it not merely a deceptive veil, a mirage, of which we must free ourselves at all costs? The Biblical tradition that God created the world out of nothing is completely inacceptable to our reason, it

runs counter to the true essence of reason; the scientific truth that ex nihilo nihil fit will never bow its proud head before this theological truth. Since the law of contradiction, in its turn, will never yield, it is inevitable that the two truths should have sooner or later to fight out together a supreme final battle. (ag§æn megistos kai eschatos tais psycha§às prokeitai. Enn. I, vi, 7.)

And this has come about; in modern times scientific truth has, of course, gained a complete victory. Of all the "proofs" of God's existence the ontological alone has kept its force, and that because it is in complete agreement with the self-evident truths of reason; that is to say, in this proof ethics have completely ousted ontology. God is the most perfect of all entities, but the idea of perfection is defined by the reason alone; we can thus be quite certain that in this definition we shall find no elements inacceptable to reason. Even the predicate of "reality", which has always given reason the greatest difficulties, has been made innocuous in the ontological proof, or, as clever people prefer to say in such cases, has been so far "explained" that it has neither rivalry nor quarrel with the predicate of the "ideal". Hegel was able to defend the ontological proof of God with a good conscience; he knew that his Logos suffered nothing from it, and that the sovereign rights of reason, so far from suffering, received new confirmation, while Mercury's wand remained in his hands. God will be robbed of the possibility of achieving supernatural miracles; but man will keep all the more safely that power of his to do natural miracles of which Epictetus boasted.

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Vehement Words

<< | >>

9

And yet the history of philosophy is greatly mistaken if it insists on seeing in the succession of philosophic systems a logical connection, and believes that our present age has not only appropriated all the achievement of the ancients, but has also progressed far beyond them. Hegel did indeed study Plotinus with full reverence, but his secret, his al§Üthin§Ü egr§Ügorsis, or "true awakening" (Enn. III, vi, 6), was clearly not revealed to him any more than it has been to Plotinus's latest commentators, Hartmann and his school, and the rest. It is probable that this mystery did not reveal itself to them precisely because they studied Plotinus so conscientiously. Plotinus, who wrote nothing till he was fifty and never re-read anything he had once written, is not to be studied, still less fixed into the chain of historical development. We should not be misled by the fact that Plotinus himself gathered together all elements of previous Greek philosophy into his "system" and thus has summed up the thousand years' work of the Greek spirit; he "served history" thereby, as every man living on earth serves history. But if we wish to grasp the true task of a philosopher we must first free him from the temporal conditions and the historic surroundings in which the momentary whim of existence placed him. Or we must at least learn to see in these circumstances, if not an actual hindrance to his creative work, yet only one of the many external stimuli to reflection.

Thus people are fond of talking of the difficulties of political life in Plotinus's age. The Roman Emperors obtained the throne by force and wielded their power as arbitrarily as they came by it. People are fond of simply explaining Plotinus's desire to flee from the world by the circumstances of his time. It seem

s quite "natural" that Plotinus would have thought and spoken differently if he had lived in another age. I repeat, on the contrary, that such "explanations" serve only to hide the truth from our eyes. Had Plotinus lived in the Middle Ages, or in the age of Pericles, or under the reign of Louis XIV, he would only have said the same thing that he does in his Enneads, in another language. Was the "arbitrariness" and bestial cruelty which ruled in Rome in the third century A.D. unknown in other ages? Would the glory of the age of Queen Elizabeth of England or the Roi Soleil of France have so blinded Plotinus's eyes as to make him believe in the rightness of human existence? Porphyry tells us that Plotinus was ashamed of his body; can one believe that dependence on the body would have seemed less wretched to him if he had lived in an age when arbitrariness appeared in the cloak of justice and strict legality? Would he not then have striven with all his forces to free his soul from the physical (t§Ün psych§Ün ch§æris e§ànai to§í s§æmatos)?

Or would he then not have praised the conquest of the fear of death ( aphobia to§í thanatou) as the supreme courage (andreia)? Would he not then have seen his philosophical ideal in the possibility of raising ourselves up above knowledge (epist§Üm§Ü), for knowledge means the Logos and the Logos means multiplicity? But if this is so, then even in the age of Queen Elizabeth or Louis XIV, Plotinus's ambition and philosophic sentiment would have caused him to flee without a look behind from this realm of self-evident truths, where there sits enthroned, not unnamed emperors of a day, but the "eternal" disembodied ideal principle whose eternal name is "natural necessity" (physik§Ü anank§Ü). It was precisely this natural necessity and the self-evident truths which accompany it against which Plotinus fought, and it is to this that he refers when he says that the soul, in so far as it is in the body, rests in deep sleep.

Any one can convince himself of this by reading with sufficient attention the ninth book of the second Ennead in which Plotinus argues against the Gnostics. Long before Plotinus's day the ancient world had come, under the influence of Plato, and still more of the Cynics and Stoics, to believe that the "body" is the source of evil upon earth. Plotinus was apparently the first of the heathen philosophers to accept this doctrine wholly and unconditionally and to transmit it to the Middle Ages as a principle admitting of no doubt and requiring no revision. There is every reason to suppose that this principle was a precondition for the diffusion of Christianity in the world of Graeco-Roman civilization. The Old Testament begins with the words: En arch§Üi epoi§Üsen ho Theos ton ouranon kai t§Ün g§Ün (In e beginning God created heaven and earth). The beginning of the fourth Gospel is different: En arch§Üi §Ün ho logos.

The doctrine of the Old Testament in the phraseology of Genesis was absolutely inacceptable to the Graeco-Roman world. In this respect the Gnostics proved themselves much firmer and more consistent than the other Christian sects of the first century A.D.; they rejected vehemently the Old Testament and its God, the Creator of heaven and earth. If we ask what made them renounce the Old Testament, we see plainly that they were impelled by the same wish which also inspired Plotinus: to free the soul from the body. The Gnostics, too, were ashamed and afraid of the "body"; they, too, were convinced that all evil on earth proceeds from the body, and drew the conclusion that man must free himself from it if he would free himself from evil. I should like to quote here a remarkable passage from Valentinus preserved in the works of Clement of Alexandria: "From the beginning (ap' arch§Üs) you are immortal and children of eternal life; you want to divide Death among you, to conquer him, to destroy him in you and through you, to annihilate and exterminate him. If you destroy the world before it destroys you, you will be rulers over all that is created and transitory." These words express with rare strength and originality a thought already known to us which gave life and content to many chapters of Plotinus's Enneads. The Gnostics see the source of evil in the "world", i.e. in physical existence. They maintain that man is by nature immortal and heir to eternal life; only in so far as he is bound up with the outer world is he delivered over to corruption and death. We must therefore over

come and destroy the world: then all power will lie in man's hands, and death, the supreme terror, will be terrible no more.

It seems as though Plotinus must have looked on the Gnostics as friends and allies; he too taught, as we remarked, that it is our task to free the soul from the bonds of the body, he too preached flight from the world of phenomena. But when he heard his own words from the mouths of the Gnostics, he fell into indescribable rage; the whole ninth book of the second Ennead is an expression of this rage. Plotinus declares - as though he himself had never said anything of the sort - that to blame the world is the supreme blasphemy; but to scorn the Creator of the world is worse blasphemy still. In contradiction to the Gnostics he speaks here of the visible world in almost the same enthusiastic words with which he speaks in the other books of the intelligible world. Historians have, as was to be expected, found a "simple" explanation for this inconsistency; the Greek was showing itself in Plotinus, and the Greek reverence for physical beauty.

A simple explanation! People are right to say that simplicity is often worse than guile. Where, then, is the "Asiatic influence" of which we heard so much before? And was Plotinus no Greek when he cried, "Let us flee from this world as quickly as possible"? Or when he taught that the only way to the highest end was monos genesthai, to cast off the outer world utterly? And was Plato, who said almost exactly the same, no Greek?

It is clear to him who wishes to see that "simple" explanations are out of place here. Here are reasons of quite another kind. Plotinus, apparently, could not endure logical elaboration of his thoughts. He himself could cast off visible, physical things, he could strive to free himself from the world, he could prefer death to life. But when the Gnostics make all these changing moods into unalterable truth, i.e. into universally valid and necessary judgments, then Plotinus grows furious. He himself never re-read what he had once written down. How did he feel now when he suddenly saw and heard that something which he had only felt and said at certain times, and only for himself, was suddenly proclaimed by the Gnostics (and that with the help of Mercury's wand!) as eternal truth, as something that always is, always has been, and always will be, and that cannot be otherwise? Yes, he had written that he had only attained that freedom without which union with God would have been impossible, through forgetfulness of the sensuous world and complete concentration on himself. And what he wrote was undoubtedly true; from time to time he needed that great inner peace in which nothing, not even "natural necessity", binds and oppresses man.

But does it then follow that the world was created by an evil God, and that we have to blame the world? That we should content ourselves with the world of ideal entities created by the hand of man and praised by the Gnostics and Stoics? The world is in a bad state, he had said, and so he had thought and written. Certainly, one can pass through this stage, but one cannot and should not make a "truth" out of it. We know how carefully Plotinus avoided all positive definitions of his Supreme Being to which he - intentionally, of course - gave the unmeaning name "the One". Hyperkalos, hyperagathos (beyond all measure beautiful, beyond all measure good), he says of it. He would not even call it a being; he declared it was epekeina no§í kai no§Üse§æs (beyond understanding and thought). All these negations and super-superlatives clearly had the one meaning and purpose, even as Plotinus's command to "soar aloft above knowledge": to free us, not from the gift which God brought us, but from those self-evident truths which are added by our reason (again, in Epictetus's words, by Mercury's wand), and by means of which the multifarious and self-contradictory material of experience is transformed into an immovable, eternally unchanging, and thus "comprehensible" idea.

For so it is: to attain freedom we must forget all that is outside us. And forget only in that measure in which knowledge binds us, in so far, that is, as that which we once experienced pretends to absolute power over us. Plotinus's "f

orgetting" is not to be understood as though he were trying to eliminate from his soul everything that it had been granted to experience. On the contrary, as his angry attacks on the Gnostics show, to escape from the outer world means for him to disenchant the soul from the eternal truths of reason which command man to see in the "natural" the bounds of the possible. Plotinus saw in these "bounds" set by reason the same enchantement et assoupissement of which Pascal tells us later. And he saw too that this spell and this charm are not at all natural, but exceedingly unnatural, indeed, supernatural. Read for example a section in the sixth book of the first Ennead (chapter ix), a section which I think that I can, without risking the accusation of arbitrariness (or even at that risk, for daring is sometimes necessary), translate by the following passage from Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov:

"He (Alyosha) turned round abruptly and went out of the old monk's cell. His soul was overflowing with enthusiasm and thirst for space and liberty. Above him stretched the dome of heaven, beyond reach of eye, sown with a thousand glittering stars. The Milky Way, only faintly apparent as yet, shimmered from the zenith to the horizon; the luminous and still night held the earth in its embrace. Against the sapphire blue of heaven arose the white towers and golden cupolas of the cathedral. In the flower beds round the house the splendid flowers of autumn had sunk to sleep till morning. The silence of the earth mingled with the silence of the sky; the mystery of earth mingled with the mystery of the stars. Alyosha stood there and gazed; then suddenly he fell to earth as though struck down... He embraced it weeping, he watered it with his tears and swore in his ecstasy to love it, to love it to the end of his days. Why did he weep? He wept with delight even in the stars which shone in the void, and was not ashamed of his ecstasy. It was as though invisible threads which bound together all God's infinitely numerous worlds were suddenly joined together in his soul, and it trembled at the touch of those unknown worlds."

<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC

In Job's Balances \ III \ Vehement Words

<< | >>

10

If Plotinus's experience was as I imagine it, if his battle against the self-evident truths was no rejection of divine gifts but only the attempt to overcome the postulates by which reason transforms the life which God gave into scientific cognition, then his Enneads get quite a different meaning and significance for us. Thus it becomes clear to us why his ethics and theodicy are so hurriedly and carelessly constructed after the ready-made scheme of the Stoics; why he tried to reconcile Plato and Aristotle, why he was sometimes not above using the first "proofs" which came to his hand, why he wrote nothing down till he was fifty years old and, once he had begun to write, never read through what he had written. Then, too, we understand why he fulfilled his civic duties so conscientiously, and finally also his curious feeling of shame, and perhaps also of fear, that he had to live burdened with a body. He no more needed ethics and theodicy than he did the property of the orphans whose guardian he was; with them he was only playing the part assigned to him in the drama of world history.

What could riches offer him? What could ethics offer him? Of course one needs the means necessary to live, and one needs ethical rules and moral principles

; else communal human life here on this bank and shoal of time would be intolerable. Man needs theodicy too - the quiet assurance that everything is right in the world. But peace and quiet assurance are precisely what Plotinus feared most. They presuppose the deep sleep of the soul which signifies to him the antechamber and transition to death, to not-being. Yet one cannot tell this to any one; not even to the initiated, much less to the uninitiated. One may not say it even to oneself more than once, and if one has said it one must forget it again, because it has no meaning in our common speech. It is that theological truth which by its "logical" construction alone has ever been at war with scientific truth. Scientific truth takes the form of a judgment, an assertion which is always and everywhere acceptable and binding on all men. But how can the unrest which ruled in Plotinus's soul be comprised in the form of a judgment? He himself has said: "In so far as the soul is in the body it. rests in deep sleep." To this one may answer: Is this truth, then, the truth of a soul freed from the body? To free oneself from the body one must die; so long as you live you are the prisoner of your body, and so your assertion that so long as the soul is within the body it rests in deep sleep, is also only the truth of a sleeper and not of waking man.

Plotinus knew as well as we do that this retort was possible; he knew, too, that all his predecessors' ethics and theodicies had been thought out for the uninitiated, for men who did not even suspect that they were sleeping, and that the task of philosophy was not to protect this sleep, but to make its continuance impossible. The external "peace" which Plotinus strove for with his theodicies and which so impressed his inexperienced disciples did not exclude a tense inner unrest, but was rather its necessary precondition. Plotinus revolted against the cares and troubles of the day simply in order to abandon himself entirely to the one deep and final unrest which he could "impart" to no one, which can be shared with no one. He does not want to waste his powers on the solution of problems of every day, and answers these questions hurriedly and fortuitously, at random. Only when he sees and hears how his own answers are turned by other men into eternal truths, then it can happen to him, as it did in his conflict with the Gnostics, to lose his "philosophic self-command" and give vent to his displeasure in angry phrases: How can one call the world bad? How can one call God, the Creator of the world, evil? And if someone had said in his presence that it was not fitting to lament the ruin of his fatherland, I think that he would have revolted again and cried from the depths of his soul: "Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, let my right hand forget its cunning, if I forget thee, 0 Jerusalem!"

I think that Plotinus could cry as well as the Psalmist: De profundis ad Te, Domine, clamavi (Out of the depths I called to Thee, 0 Lord). I think that Plotinus's soul knew great joy and also great sorrow over the "everyday" events concerning which he taught the uninitiated, following the Stoics, that they were adiaphora (indifferent) and not even worth mentioning. Perhaps he asked fate and the Creator, not only about the death of great Socrates, but also about the crushed toad (the unknown Job of the Bible) which had found no place in his theodicy. He surely laughed himself over his meditations that every man must be content with the part assigned him by fate; he had compared the world with a play in which some men are given leading parts and others obscure ones, where what is important is not the part which one plays, but how conscientiously one plays it; for the play and not the players is the important thing.

It is certain, I say, that Plotinus would have laughed at his own meditations; he would certainly have been furious if he had heard them from the mouths of the Gnostics or other men with whom he did not sympathize; if, for example, he had been able to read Leibniz's theodicy, in which his own thoughts are set out with such circumstance and detail. All Plotinus's enthusiasm was derived from his consciousness of the high destiny of man. He did not try to prevent the evildoer from perpetrating his crimes or the fool his folly, because the play needs not only noble and clever characters but also villains and fools! The task of his

philosophy, which he himself described in the one phrase to timi§ætaton, was liberation from the nightmare of visible reality.

In what, then, did this nightmare consist? In what the horror? Whence came it? The Gnostics taught that the world was detestable in itself. For Plotinus this was inacceptable; he knew that it was not the world which was the evil and not the world that hid from us the timi§ætaton, which he was seeking. He knew that one can only awaken from the nightmare when one suddenly (eksaiphn§Üs) gets the sensation that self-evident truths are nothing but a certain enchantement et assoupissement. But this magic spell was no "chance" one. Plotinus and Pascal, each in his day, saw the "supernatural" power and felt it with all their souls. This force was enchanting man by convincing him of the "natural necessity" and the infallibility of reason which offered man eternal and universally valid truths. Plotinus combated the "theory of knowledge" inherited from his predecessors, i.e. the theory of the truths self-evident to all men. Against it, as we saw, he placed the theory of the "twofold truth" which Pascal expressed so boldly in those words of his (which history has ignored): "On n'entend rien aux ouvrages de Dieu si on ne prend pour principe qu¡‾il a voulu aveugler les uns et §Ûclairer les autres." ("One understands nothing of God's works unless one assumes as principle that He wished to blind some and enlighten others.") I think we can say with assurance that Plotinus would have seen only a superbe diabolique in Epictetus's claim to Mercury's wand, as Pascal did in the philosophers' summum bonum; that he saw no miracle in the natural miracles of which Stoic ethics boasted, but only a futile imitation or even a caricature of a miracle. Perhaps an expression like superbe diabolique should not be taken as blame, coming from Plotinus; but perhaps - who knows - neither did Pascal in his heart of hearts blame Epictetus. Perhaps Pascal understood that Epictetus only took to his natural magic faute de mieux; reason, which Epictetus, after his great Greek masters, trusted absolutely, had lulled to sleep his ability, even in his rare moments of spiritual exaltation, to look upon the "theological" truth, which was imparted to Pascal and Plotinus in the state of ecstasy.

Epictetus and the other Stoics, and with them the whole official Greek philosophy whose heirs we have involuntarily become, did not admit the possibility of real miracles. For Epictetus the law of contradiction was the final and supreme law which binds men and gods equally. It would have seemed madness to him if Pascal had said to him that the law of contradiction is precisely that angel with the flaming sword whom God posted at the gate of Paradise after the Fall of our forefather Adam. For Epictetus the way to achieve the Supreme, both for men and for gods, is complete subjection to the law. The law was "in the beginning" and will also be at the end. He formed an image from the law which he worshipped like a god, for the law is, like a god, "spirit", an ideal entity which knows neither genesis (origin) nor phthora (destruction). The doctrine of Epictetus which has so entranced man - and not only the simple but also philosophers - culminates in instilling into them the conviction that the idol which he has created is God, and that there are no other gods beside it, and that the purpose and destiny of man is to serve this idol. He rejects the carven images which his ancestors made, the images of gold and silver, ivory and marble. But he worships the ideal image without seeing that it is an image. And it came to pass that after him even those men who knew the message brought down from Sinai did not perceive that an image formed of ideas as little resembles God as an image formed of any coarse physical matter.

Truth has ceased to be for man a living entity and has become an ideal entity (a mathematical function, an ethic idealism, practically identical conceptions). Natural necessity is for us today a boundary conception which marks the final triumph of "reason". today those who conscientiously study and read the Enneads see in Plotinus himself a philosopher enchanted by the self-evident truths of reason. And, I repeat, his works offer sufficient foundation for this view. But - for the last time - Plotinus never read through his works, and was so far from

troubling to purify them from contradictions that he actually did everything in his power to keep those contradictions in their whole audacious shamelessness. These contradictions were necessary for him. Like his remote spiritual forefather Socrates, he felt that he must not lull to sleep the unrest and spiritual tension within him, but goad it on to the highest degree, where sleep becomes impossible. And that, we must assume, is why he tried so persistently to separate the soul from the body. He knew that this separation is the greatest of pains and that great pain alone can bring with it that "true awakening" for which he strove his whole life long. He demanded from man renunciation of all that is dearest to him, and repeated continually that the dearest could be taken from him. The most necessary, most important, most valuable - to timi§ætaton - cafl be taken from us at any moment; he reminds us of this continually. And the human miracles which Stoicism and Gnosticism after it promised us will never replace that timi§ætaton. We cannot exchange gifts of the gods for those of men.

And sometimes (not, I repeat, often, not pollakis, but on very rare occasions) when the soul succeeds in awakening from the self-evident truths of reason it becomes convinced that it is kreittonos moiras (a higher lot, praestantioris sortis esse, as Marsilio Ficino translates it), that another destiny awaits it than men think. It was not born to "subject" itself. Submission and the glorification of submission are the results of a spell which has been cast over us. Plotinus, who himself hymned subjection, begins to believe that the "audacity", tolma, which he himself blamed so strongly, is the supreme gift of the gods. On earth laws hold sway. Earthly potentates, both anointed kings and tyrants and usurpers, all command and treasure obedience above all things. Nothing else is possible on earth. Here laws, both those of nature and those of the human community, are the necessary postulates of human existence. But "in the beginning" there were no laws; the law "came afterwards". And at the end there will again be no laws. God demands nothing of man, He only gives. And in His realm, in that realm of which Plotinus sings in inspired moments, the word compulsion loses all meaning. There, behind the gate guarded by the angel with the flaming sword, even truth, which according to our conceptions has the most unquestioned of rights to demand submission, will cease to desire to compel any one, and will gladly welcome by its side a contradictory truth. And there the wretched toad, whose fate it was on earth either to turn aside from the road or to be crushed, will not turn aside and will not be crushed. There God's real miracles will be performed, not the ideal miracles of Socrates and Epictetus. And there will be the Creator of the real earthly miracles, the "One" who brought sleep and trance to man and enchanted him by the self-evident truths of reason. To Him, the One who created our wonderful visible world, Plotinus's soul turns in his rare moments of inspired exultation. Then he sees that in a new balance hitherto unknown to man Job's sorrow really weighs more than the heavy sands of the sea; then his speech becomes ecstatic, and in the philosopher the psalmist is born - phug§Ü monou pros monon: the flight of the one to the One.

FINIS<< | >>

Orphus system home intro texts links biblio ToC